AS one wanders along this southwestern promontory of the Isle of Peace,
and looks down upon the green translucent water which forever bathes the
marble slopes of the Pirates’ Cave, it is natural to think of the ten
wrecks with which the past winter has strewn this shore. Though almost
all trace of their presence is already gone, yet their mere memory lends
to these cliffs a human interest. Where a stranded vessel lies, thither
all steps converge, so long as one plank remains upon another. There
centres the emotion. All else is but the setting, and the eye sweeps
with indifference the line of unpeopled rocks. They are barren, till the
imagination has tenanted them with possibilities of danger and dismay.
The ocean provides the scenery and properties of a perpetual tragedy,
but the interest arrives with the performers. Till then the shores
remain vacant, like the great conventional armchairs of the French
drama, that wait for Rachel to come and die.
Yet as I ride along this fashionable avenue in August, and watch the
procession of the young and fair,--as I look at stately houses, from
each of which has gone forth almost within my memory a funeral or a
bride,--then every thoroughfare of human life becomes in fancy but an
ocean shore, with its ripples and its wrecks. One learns, in growing
older, that no fiction can be so strange nor appear so improbable as
would the simple truth; and that doubtless even Shakespeare did but
timidly transcribe a few of the deeds and passions he had personally
known. For no man of middle age can dare trust himself to portray
life in its full intensity, as he has studied or shared it; he must
resolutely set aside as indescribable the things most worth describing,
and must expect to be charged with exaggeration, even when he tells the
rest.