It is not an
accident that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so
arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into
their creation, and they expressed him very well; his cunning, and his
mastery, and his adventurous heart. For the wind is in nothing more
capitally our friend than in this, that it has been, since men were men,
their ally in the seeking of the unknown and in their divine thirst for
travel which, in its several aspects--pilgrimage, conquest, discovery,
and, in general, enlargement--is one prime way whereby man fills himself
with being.
I love to think of those Norwegian men who set out eagerly before the
north-east wind when it came down from their mountains in the month of
March like a god of great stature to impel them to the West. They pushed
their Long Keels out upon the rollers, grinding the shingle of the beach
at the fjord-head. They ran down the calm narrows, they breasted and
they met the open sea. Then for days and days they drove under this
master of theirs and high friend, having the wind for a sort of captain,
and looking always out to the sea line to find what they could find. It
was the springtime; and men feel the spring upon the sea even more
surely than they feel it upon the land. They were men whose eyes, pale
with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable good sight
which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change and that
comes after the long emptiness of sea days like a vision after the
sameness of our common lives.
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