We have toiled for many years and been troubled with many questionings, but what is the end of it all? We must learn to become simple again like little children. That is all we have a right to be: for this life was meant to be the childhood of our souls, and the more we try to be what we were meant to be, the better for us. Let us use the powers of our minds with the greatest freedom and love of truth, but let us never forget that we are, as Newton said, like children playing on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before us.
And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,-- That star of life's tremulous ocean.
Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.--_Colton._
The object of my book is to prove that the ocean, with the other seas, by means of the sun causes our world to shine like the moon and to appear as a star to other worlds; and this I will prove.
The ancients called man the world in miniature, and certainly the name is a happy one, because man being composed of earth, water, air and fire, the body of the earth resembles the body of man. As man has in him bones for the support and framework of his flesh, likewise in the world the rocks are the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in their breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean which rises and falls every six hours as if the world breathed; as from the aforesaid pool of blood veins issue which {164} ramify throughout the human body, so does the ocean fill the body of the earth with innumerable veins of water. The body of the earth lacks sinews, which do not exist because sinews are made for movement, and the world being in perpetual stability no movement occurs, and there being no movement, sinews are not necessary; but in all other points they resemble each other greatly.
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, / Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
A life on the ocean wave! A home on the rolling deep, Where the scattered waters rave, And the winds their revels keep!
Our life should feed the springs of fame / With a perennial wave, / As ocean feeds the bubbling founts / Which find in it their grave.
And now, if we gaze from our native shores over the vast ocean of human speech, with its waves rolling on from continent to continent, rising under the fresh breezes of the morning of history, and slowly heaving in our own more sultry atmosphere, with sails gliding over its surface, and many an oar ploughing through its surf, and the flags of all nations waving joyously together, with its rocks and wrecks, its storms and battles, yet reflecting serenely all that is beneath and above and around it; if we gaze and hearken to the strange sounds rushing past our ears in unbroken strains, it seems no longer a wild tumult, but we feel as if placed within some ancient cathedral, listening to a chorus of innumerable voices: and the more intensely we listen, the more all discords melt away into higher harmonies, till at last we hear but one majestic trichord, or a mighty unison, as at the end of a sacred symphony. Such visions will float through the study of the grammarian, and in the midst of toilsome researches his heart will suddenly beat, as he feels the conviction growing upon him that men are brethren in the simplest sense of the word--the children of the same father--whatever their country, their language, and their faith.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale.
Nothing is generated in a place where is no sentient vegetable and rational life; feathers grow on birds and change every year; coats grow on animals and are changed every year, with some {163} exceptions, like the lion's beard and the cat's fur, and such; grass grows in the fields and leaves on the trees; and every year they are renewed in great part. Thus we can say that the spirit of growth is the soul of the earth, the soil its flesh, the ordered arrangement of rocks its bones, of which mountains are formed, the tufa its tendons; its blood the veins of water which surround its heart, which is the ocean; its breathing and increase and decrease of blood in the pulses the ebb and flood of the sea; and the heat of the spirit of the world is fire which pervades the earth, and the vital soul dwells in the fires which from various apertures of the earth issue in springs and sulphur minerals and volcanoes, as at Mount Etna in Sicily and in many other places.
My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?
The earth was unintelligible to the ancients because looked upon as a solitary being, without a peer in the whole universe; but it assumed a new and true significance as soon as it rose before the eyes of man as one of many planets, all governed by the same laws, and all revolving around the same centre. It is the same with the human soul, and its nature stands before our mind in quite a different light since man has been taught to know and feel himself as a member of a great family--as one of the myriads of wandering stars all governed by the same laws, and all revolving around the same centre, and all deriving their light from the same source. 'Universal History' has laid open new avenues of thought, and it has enriched our language with a word which never passed the lips of Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle--_Mankind_. Where the Greek saw barbarians, we see brethren; where the Greek saw nations, we see mankind, toiling and suffering, separated by oceans, divided by language, and severed by national enmity,--yet evermore tending, under a divine control, towards the fulfilment of that inscrutable purpose for which the world was created, and man placed in it, bearing the image of God. History therefore, with its dusty and mouldering pages, is to us as sacred a volume as the book of nature. In both we read, or we try to read, the reflex of the laws and thoughts of a Divine Wisdom. We believe that there is nothing irrational in either history or nature, and that the human mind is called upon to read and to revere in both the manifestations of a Divine Power.
SALVATION BELONGS TO THE LORD! — JONAH 2:9 Salvation is the work of God. It is He alone who quickens the soul “dead in . . . trespasses and sins,”1 and He it is who maintains the soul in its spiritual life. He is both “Alpha and Omega.” “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” If I am prayerful, God makes me prayerful; if I have graces, they are God’s gifts to me; if I hold on in a consistent life, it is because He upholds me with His hand. I do nothing whatever toward my own preservation, except what God Himself first does in me. Whatever I have, all my goodness is of the Lord alone. Whenever I sin, that is my own doing; but when I act correctly, that is wholly and completely of God. If I have resisted a spiritual enemy, the Lord’s strength nerved my arm. Do I live before men a consecrated life? It is not I, but Christ who lives in me. Am I sanctified? I did not cleanse myself: God’s Holy Spirit sanctifies me. Am I separated from the world? I am separated by God’s chastisements sanctified to my good. Do I grow in knowledge? The great Instructor teaches me. All my jewels were fashioned by heavenly art. I find in God all that I want; but I find in myself nothing but sin and misery. “He only is my rock and my salvation.”2 Do I feed on the Word? That Word would be no food for me unless the Lord made it food for my soul and helped me to feed upon it. Do I live on the bread that comes down from heaven? What is that bread but Jesus Christ Himself incarnate, whose body and whose blood I eat and drink? Am I continually receiving fresh supplies of strength? Where do I gather my might? My help comes from heaven’s hills: Without Jesus I can do nothing. As a branch cannot bring forth fruit except it abide in the vine, no more can I, except I abide in Him. What Jonah learned in the ocean, let me learn this morning in my room: “Salvation belongs to the LORD.
The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.
The shores of the sea continually increase in soil, towards the middle of the sea; the cliffs and promontories of the sea are continually being ruined and consumed; the mediterranean seas will dry up and all that will remain will be the channel of the greatest river which enters into them; this will flow to the ocean and pour out its waters together with that of all the rivers which are its tributaries.
When soon or late they reach that coast, / O'er life's rough ocean driven, / May they rejoice, no wanderer lost, / A family in heaven.
She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all.
What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent? In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil's view, the simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life. First, a base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done. Second, a period of national uneasiness about America's place in the scheme of human activities must exist. Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses the national attention upon the direction to proceed. Finally, an articulate and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with words and action the great thing to be accomplished. The motivation of young Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of conditions. ... The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John Kennedys appear. We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they, and their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward. -- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt
The smiling Spring comes in rejoicing, And surly Winter grimly flies. Now crystal clear are the falling waters, And bonnie blue are the sunny skies. Fresh o'er the mountains breaks forth the morning, The ev'ning gilds the oceans's swell: All creatures joy in the sun's returning, And I rejoice in my bonnie Bell. The flowery Spring leads sunny Summer, The yellow Autumn presses near; Then in his turn come gloomy Winter, Till smiling Spring again appear. Thus seasons dancing, life advancing, Old Time and Nature their changes tell; But never ranging, still unchanging, I adore my bonnie Bell. -- Robert Burns, "My Bonnie Bell"
Diana, awful progeny of Jove! I would that with a shaft this moment sped Into my bosom, thou would'st here conclude My mournful life! or, oh that, as it flies, Snatching me through the pathless air, a storm Would whelm me deep in Ocean's restless tide! So, when the Gods their parents had destroy'd, Storms suddenly the beauteous daughters snatch'd Of Pandarus away; them left forlorn Venus with curds, with honey and with wine Fed duly; Juno gave them to surpass All women in the charms of face and mind, With graceful stature eminent the chaste Diana bless'd them, and in works of art Illustrious, Pallas taught them to excel. But when the foam-sprung Goddess to the skies A suitress went on their behalf, to obtain Blest nuptials for them from the Thund'rer Jove, (For Jove the happiness, himself, appoints, And the unhappiness of all below) Meantime, the Harpies ravishing away Those virgins, gave them to the Furies Three, That they might serve them. O that me the Gods Inhabiting Olympus so would hide From human eyes for ever, or bright-hair'd Diana pierce me with a shaft, that while Ulysses yet engages all my thoughts, My days concluded, I might 'scape the pain Of gratifying some inferior Chief! This is supportable, when (all the day To sorrow giv'n) the mourner sleeps at night; For sleep, when it hath once the eyelids veil'd, All reminiscence blots of all alike, Both good and ill; but me the Gods afflict Not seldom ev'n in dreams, and at my side, This night again, one lay resembling him; Such as my own Ulysses when he join'd Achaia's warriors; my exulting heart No airy dream believed it, but a truth.
Now was the world forsaken by the sun, And Phoebe half her nightly race had run. The careful chief, who never clos'd his eyes, Himself the rudder holds, the sails supplies. A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood, Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood; But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep, As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep. They know him from afar; and in a ring Inclose the ship that bore the Trojan king. Cymodoce, whose voice excell'd the rest, Above the waves advanc'd her snowy breast; Her right hand stops the stern; her left divides The curling ocean, and corrects the tides. She spoke for all the choir, and thus began With pleasing words to warn th' unknowing man: "Sleeps our lov'd lord? O goddess-born, awake! Spread ev'ry sail, pursue your wat'ry track, And haste your course. Your navy once were we, From Ida's height descending to the sea; Till Turnus, as at anchor fix'd we stood, Presum'd to violate our holy wood. Then, loos'd from shore, we fled his fires profane (Unwillingly we broke our master's chain), And since have sought you thro' the Tuscan main. The mighty Mother chang'd our forms to these, And gave us life immortal in the seas. But young Ascanius, in his camp distress'd, By your insulting foes is hardly press'd. Th' Arcadian horsemen, and Etrurian host, Advance in order on the Latian coast: To cut their way the Daunian chief designs, Before their troops can reach the Trojan lines. Thou, when the rosy morn restores the light, First arm thy soldiers for th' ensuing fight: Thyself the fated sword of Vulcan wield, And bear aloft th' impenetrable shield. To-morrow's sun, unless my skill be vain, Shall see huge heaps of foes in battle slain." Parting, she spoke; and with immortal force Push'd on the vessel in her wat'ry course; For well she knew the way. Impell'd behind, The ship flew forward, and outstripp'd the wind. The rest make up. Unknowing of the cause, The chief admires their speed, and happy omens draws.
In such risings of fire and risings of sea--the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore--three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of her home.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate, which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that while.
Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea--what matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!"
Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everybody; and next he went a-charging up on to the platform, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He told them he was a piratebeen a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Oceanand his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he'd been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, "Don't you thank me, don't you give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!"
He ended, and his words beat on my heart As they would break it. On the sands I sat Weeping, nor life nor light desiring more. But when I had in dust roll'd me, and wept To full satiety, mine ear again The oracle of Ocean thus address'd. Sit not, O son of Atreus! weeping here Longer, for remedy can none be found; But quick arising, trial make, how best Thou shalt, and soonest, reach thy home again. For either him still living thou shalt find, Or ere thou come, Orestes shall have slain The traytor, and thine eyes shall see his tomb.
To whom Ulysses, ever-wise, replied. Oh Queen! the task were difficult to unfold In all its length the story of my woes, For I have num'rous from the Gods receiv'd; But I will answer thee as best I may. There is a certain isle, Ogygia, placed Far distant in the Deep; there dwells, by man Alike unvisited, and by the Gods, Calypso, beauteous nymph, but deeply skill'd In artifice, and terrible in pow'r, Daughter of Atlas. Me alone my fate Her miserable inmate made, when Jove Had riv'n asunder with his candent bolt My bark in the mid-sea. There perish'd all The valiant partners of my toils, and I My vessel's keel embracing day and night With folded arms, nine days was borne along. But on the tenth dark night, as pleas'd the Gods, They drove me to Ogygia, where resides Calypso, beauteous nymph, dreadful in pow'r; She rescued, cherish'd, fed me, and her wish Was to confer on me immortal life, Exempt for ever from the sap of age. But me her offer'd boon sway'd not. Sev'n years I there abode continual, with my tears Bedewing ceaseless my ambrosial robes, Calypso's gift divine; but when, at length, (Sev'n years elaps'd) the circling eighth arrived, She then, herself, my quick departure thence Advised, by Jove's own mandate overaw'd, Which even her had influenced to a change. On a well-corded raft she sent me forth With num'rous presents; bread she put and wine On board, and cloath'd me in immortal robes; She sent before me also a fair wind Fresh-blowing, but not dang'rous. Sev'nteen days I sail'd the flood continual, and descried, On the eighteenth, your shadowy mountains tall When my exulting heart sprang at the sight, All wretched as I was, and still ordain'd To strive with difficulties many and hard From adverse Neptune; he the stormy winds Exciting opposite, my wat'ry way Impeded, and the waves heav'd to a bulk Immeasurable, such as robb'd me soon Deep-groaning, of the raft, my only hope; For her the tempest scatter'd, and myself This ocean measur'd swimming, till the winds And mighty waters cast me on your shore. Me there emerging, the huge waves had dash'd Full on the land, where, incommodious most, The shore presented only roughest rocks, But, leaving it, I swam the Deep again, Till now, at last, a river's gentle stream Receiv'd me, by no rocks deform'd, and where No violent winds the shelter'd bank annoy'd. I flung myself on shore, exhausted, weak, Needing repose; ambrosial night came on, When from the Jove-descended stream withdrawn, I in a thicket lay'd me down on leaves Which I had heap'd together, and the Gods O'erwhelm'd my eye-lids with a flood of sleep. There under wither'd leaves, forlorn, I slept All the long night, the morning and the noon, But balmy sleep, at the decline of day, Broke from me; then, your daughter's train I heard Sporting, with whom she also sported, fair And graceful as the Gods. To her I kneel'd. She, following the dictates of a mind Ingenuous, pass'd in her behaviour all Which even ye could from an age like hers Have hoped; for youth is ever indiscrete. She gave me plenteous food, with richest wine Refresh'd my spirit, taught me where to bathe, And cloath'd me as thou seest; thus, though a prey To many sorrows, I have told thee truth.