On hearing eight bells last night I supposed it to be twelve o’clock.
Having gone to bed at half past eight I felt rested, looked out of
my window and thought I saw “The Dipper,” not knowing but that the
ship was tacking and going North. Wishing to salute our old friend,
the north star, I put on my wrapper and went on deck and was told by
the man at the wheel that it was five o’clock. The eight bells were
for four o’clock instead of twelve, so soundly had I slept. I staid
up to see the sunrise, wishing to correct the impression which I had
long cherished that there is more to be enjoyed in the idea of sunrise
than in its actual beauty. This I was willing to attribute to the
want of disposition when drowsy to appreciate the morning. We are
prejudiced in favor of a departing day, look kindly on the advancing
darkness; we have pleasant associations with the season of repose; it
awakens no apprehensions of care, nor of labor; each step of coming
night is associated with quiet, while the opening day is the signal
for noise; we are not so much disposed to welcome an untried day with
its liabilities, as a finished day which can make no new demands upon
us. The valedictory of sundown implies less responsibility than the
salutatory of a new day. The progressive development of evening with
the softening, fading colors, its pathos, finds us more disposed to
sympathize with it than we are with a day yet to be tested. But
morning has it votaries and its poetry. Therefore,
“Now while the Heaven by the sun’s team untrod
Hath took no print of the approaching light,”
let me see once more if the beauty of morning is real or wholly ideal.
There are no birds in our tops to herald its coming; no living things
to make it appear that they welcome the return of light, the flying
fish are no more of them on the wing than when the ship at night breaks
in among them, nor do the porpoises gambol more at day break than
at noon. There is a touch of pathos in seeing the stars pale in the
growing light; but they cannot awaken much sentiment in us; we find
it, if at all, in the victories of light over darkness; the imprint of
beauty on monotony; the responses of the zenith and then of the west to
the first outgoings of the morning in the east, the crimson bars, the
purpling cloud, the snowy top of a pile whose base is yet black. But do
we not yield a ready response to these oft quoted words, or do we pass
them over as the desponding language of a decaying race: “Let others
hail the rising sun,” and count it as merely an act of resistless
sympathy to “bow to him whose course is run?” It must be acknowledged
that sitting on deck three quarters of an hour in a dishabille dress
in the middle of January to see day break, required the temperature of
Pacific latitudes to make the experience pleasant. I could not decide
which to choose, abstractly. “The day is Thine, the night also is
Thine.”