Still speaking of the sea; for I am too far from shore
now to turn back, we had one day of it in which was
painfully illustrated the line, “Water, water
everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” The
steward, having been changed from his own ship to
ours without notice, had not laid in his wines and
liquors for the voyage. It was awful news when
it was announced after getting out to sea, and paled
many a cheek. Much to our surprise, however,
all the next morning one of the passengers appeared
in a state of exhilaration not to be accounted for
by anything we had seen on the table. Later,
he appeared still worse, and as he did not appear
at dinner, we concluded that he was drinking to excess
in his room. A passenger said indignantly that
“the man was killing himself,” and volunteered
to go in and see about him. About dark, that
day, the volunteer made his appearance on deck.
After some uncertain steps he managed to seat himself
on a coil of rope. Looking at us with a look
of solemn philanthropy in his face, he announced thickly,
that “I got t’way from’m at last.”
It was very clear that he had.
* * * *
*
Do you know that I never travel the sea that I am
not pervaded by an antagonistic and contradictory
frame of mind that sets itself against all the popular
and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses
me with neither the majesty nor the power of God.
Indeed, it does not impress me with God at all, but
to the contrary, gives me a sort of undefined, painful
unbelief. To me, somehow, there is no other side
of the ocean. And looking out on its boundless
space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions
of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters,
I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom,
that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems
a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder
if this is not so with others. I wonder if all
of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge
in our own hearts where alone we can hear the voice
of God, and where, at any hour or in any scene, we
can find an instant answer to all our doubts.
There is but one spot on the ocean that leads me to
a sort of a fanciful realization of a future life.
It is that red one made by the setting sun, especially
if we be off shore, and the birds are flying landward.
The roseate bridge thrown across the water, swinging
with the waves, the intense and silver bright-ness
of the centre of the arc framed in the evening clouds
that roll around it, and the gleaming wings of the
birds, as they flash across the disc and disappear
in the shining centre on their way homeward, somehow
bring to my mind the gates ajar and the souls flying
from earth to their final rest. There may be
beautiful pictures to come after this life; if there
are, sunset at sea is as near as our mortal minds
can yet come to them.
