Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps
a poem, about the sea-shore--that suggesting, dividing line, contact,
junction, the solid marrying the liquid--that curious, lurking
something, (as doubtless every objective form finally becomes to the
subjective spirit,) which means far more than its mere first sight,
grand as that is--blending the real and ideal, and each made portion
of the other. Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood,
I haunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney island, or away east to the
Hamptons or Montauk. Once, at the latter place, (by the old lighthouse,
nothing but sea-tossings in sight in every direction as far as the eye
could reach,) I remember well, I felt that I must one day write a book
expressing this liquid, mystic theme. Afterward, I recollect, how it
came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary
attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible _influence_, a pervading
gauge and tally for me, in my composition. (Let me give a hint here to
young writers. I am not sure but I have unwittingly follow'd out the
same rule with other powers besides sea and shores--avoiding them,
in the way of any dead set at poetizing them, as too big for formal
handling--quite satisfied if I could indirectly show that we have met
and fused, even if only once, but enough--that we have really absorb'd
each other and understand each other.)
There is a dream, a picture, that for years at intervals, (sometimes
quite long ones, but surely again, in time,) has come noiselessly up
before me, and I really believe, fiction as it is, has enter'd largely
into my practical life--certainly into my writings, and shaped and
color'd them. It is nothing more or less than a stretch of interminable
white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually,
grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and
hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums. This scene, this
picture, I say, has risen before me at times for years. Sometimes I wake
at night and can hear and see it plainly.