"I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life not very long,but with a record which much longer lives could not match in incident.Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous urgency to try a change of existence,if such change is a part of human destiny,--to seek rest,if that is what we gain by laying down the burden of life.I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal for the last service I should have need of.
Ocean was there,all ready,asking no questions,answering none.
What strange voyages,downward through its glaucous depths,upwards to its boiling and frothing surface,wafted by tides,driven by tempests,disparted by rude agencies;one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach,one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific,one settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built,to emerge in far-off ages!
What strange companions for my pall-bearers!Unwieldy sea-monsters,the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature;naked-eyed creatures,staring,glaring,nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green abysses;pulpy islands,with life in gelatinous immensity,--what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral!No!No!
Ocean claims great multitudes,but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid of himself.
'Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I have ever found when drifting idly over its surface?No,again.Ido not want the sweet,clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature,when life,the faithful body-servant,has ceased caring for me.That must not be.The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an unwelcome object.
"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend,and lead me out of my prison,it shall be the busy,whispering,not unfriendly,pleasantly companionable river.
"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods of human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should consider.Let the child play upon the seashore.The wide horizon gives his imagination room to grow in,untrammelled.That background of mystery,without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement,is shaped and colored,so far as it can have outline,or any hue but shadow,on a vast canvas,the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere of consciousness.The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.
"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid limit,which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities.Then he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean.It is individual,which the ocean,with all its gulfs and inlets and multitudinous shores,hardly seems to be.It does not love you very dearly,and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin;but it means well to you,bids you good-morning with its coming waves,and good-evening with those which are leaving.It will lead your thoughts pleasantly away,upwards to its source,downwards to the stream to which it is tributary,or the wide waters in which it is to lose itself.A river,by choice,to live by in middle age.
"In hours of melancholy reflection,in those last years of life which have little left but tender memories,the still companionship of the lake,embosomed in woods,sheltered,fed by sweet mountain brooks and hidden springs,commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit.
I am not thinking of those great inland seas,which have many of the features and much of the danger that belong to the ocean,but of those 'ponds,'as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer visitors;beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand acres in extent,scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern sovereignties.The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural home in the near neighborhood of one of these tranquil basins.
Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong,but if we look carefully their affinities betray themselves.The youth will carry his Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well.The man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames.The old man,as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth,will recognize the affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he wrote,--the stainless and sleepy Windermere.
