The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the
father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel
northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he
learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material
quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're
wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"
"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace."
The Spell of the Yukon.
Or another verse:
"I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it--
Came out with a fortune last fall--
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all."
The Spell of the Yukon.
Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl
our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come
to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,
"All you can take in your cold, dead hand
Is what you have given away."
And how the warning against sin hurtles its
way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power:
"It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it's been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end."
The Spell of the Yukon.
Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the
guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting
Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you."
Service says the same thing in "It grips you."