Off Shore
Who has not heard, amid the heat and din of cities, the voice of the
sea striking suddenly into the hush of thought its penetrating note of
mystery and longing? Then work and the fever which goes with it
vanished on the instant, and in the crowded street or in the narrow
room there rose the vision of unbroken stretches of sky, free winds,
and the surge of the unresting waves. That invitation never loses its
alluring power; no distance wastes its music, and no preoccupation
silences its solicitation. It stirs the oldest memories, and awakens
the most primitive instincts; the long past speaks through it, and
through it the buried generations snatch a momentary immortality.
History that has left no record, rich and varied human experiences that
have no chronicle, rise out of the forgetfulness in which they are
engulfed, and are puissant once more in the intense and irresistible
longing with which the heart answers the call of the sea. Once more
the blood flows with fuller pulse, the eye flashes with conscious
freedom and power, the heart beats to the music of wind and wave, as in
the days when the fathers of a long past spread sail and sought home,
spoil, or change upon the trackless waste. Into every past the sea has
sometime sounded its mighty note of joy or anguish, and deep in every
memory there remains some vision of tossing waves that once broke on
eyes long sealed.
All day the free winds have filled the heavens, and flung here and
there a handful of foam upon the surface of the deep. No cloud has
dimmed the splendour of a day which has filled the round heavens with
soft music and touched the sea with strange and changeful beauty. It
has been enough to wait and watch, to forget self, to escape the
limitations of personality, and to become part of the movement, which,
hour by hour, has passed through one marvellous change after another,
until now it seems to pause under the sleepless vigilance of the stars.
They look down from their immeasurable altitudes on the vast expanse of
which only a miniature hemisphere stretches before me. How wide and
fathomless seems the ocean, even from a single isolated point! What
infinite distances are only half veiled by the distant horizon line!
What islands and continents and undiscovered worlds lie beyond that
faint and ever receding circle where the sight pauses, while the
thought travels unimpeded on its pathless way? There lies the untamed
world which brooks no human control, and preserves the primeval
solitude of the epochs before men came; there are the elemental forces
mingling and commingling in eternal fellowships and rivalries. There
the winds sweep, and the storms marshal their shadows as on the first
day; there, too, the sunlight sleeps on the summer sea as it slept in
those forgotten summers before a sail had ever whitened the blue, or a
keel cut evanescent furrows in the trackless waste.
Every hour has brought its change to make this day memorable; hour by
hour the lights have transformed the waters and hung over them a sky
full of varied and changeful radiance. Across the line of the distant
horizon white sails have come and gone in broken and mysterious
procession, and the imagination has followed them far in their unknown
journeyings. As silently as they passed from sight, all human history
enacted in this vast province of nature's empire has vanished, and left
no trace of itself save here and there a bit of driftwood. There lies
the unconquered and forever inviolate kingdom of forces over which no
human skill will ever cast the net of conquest.
The sea speaks to the imagination as no other aspect of the natural
world does, because of its vastness, its immeasurable and overwhelming
power, its exclusion from human history, its free, buoyant, changeful
being. It stands for those strange and unfamiliar revelations with
which Nature sometimes breaks in upon our easy relation with her, and
brings back on the instant that sense of remoteness which one feels
when in intimate fellowship a friend suddenly lifts the curtain from
some great experience hitherto unsuspected. In the vast sweep of life
through Nature there must always be aspects of awful strangeness; great
realms of mystery will remain unexplored, and almost inaccessible to
human thought; days will dawn at intervals in which those who love most
and are nearest Nature will feel an impenetrable cloud over all things,
and be suddenly smitten with a sense of weakness; the greatest of all
her interpreters are but children in knowledge of her mighty activities
and forces. On the sea this sense of remoteness and strangeness comes
oftener than in the presence of any other natural form; even the
mountains make sheltered places for our thought at their feet, or along
their precipitous ledges; but the sea makes no concessions to our human
weakness, and leaves the message which it intones with the voice of
tempest and the roar of surge without an interpreter. Men have come to
it in all ages, full of a passionate desire to catch its meaning and
enter into its secret, but the thought of the boldest of them has only
skirted its shores, and the vast sweep of untamed waters remains as on
the first day. Homer has given us the song of the landlocked sea, but
where has the ocean found a human voice that is not lost and forgotten
when it speaks to us in its own penetrating tones? The mountains stand
revealed in more than one interpretation, touched by their own
sublimity, but the sea remains silent in human speech, because no voice
will ever be strong enough to match its awful monody.
It is because the sea preserves its secret that it sways our
imagination so royally, and holds us by an influence which never
loosens its grasp. Again and again we return to it, spent and worn,
and it refills the cup of vitality; there is life enough and to spare
in its invisible and inexhaustible chambers to reclothe the continents
with verdure, and recreate the shattered strength of man. Facing its
unbroken solitudes the limitations of habit and thought become less
obvious; we escape the monotony of a routine, which blurs the senses
and makes the spirit less sensitive to the universe about it. Life
becomes free and plastic once more; a deep consciousness of its
inexhaustibleness comes over us and recreates hope, vigour, and
imagination. Under the little bridges of habit and theory, which we
have made for ourselves, how vast and fathomless the sea of being is!
What undiscovered forces are there; what unknown secrets of power; what
unsearchable possibilities of development and change! How fresh and
new becomes that which we thought outworn with use and touched with
decay! How boundless and untravelled that which we thought explored
and sounded to its remotest bound!
At night, when the vision of the waters grows indistinct, what voices
it has for our solitude! The "eternal note of sadness," to which all
ages and races have listened, and the faint echoes of which are heard
in every literature, fills us with a longing as vast as the sea and as
vague. Infinity and eternity are not too great for the spirit when the
spell of the sea is on it, and the voice of the sea fills it with
uncreated music.