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- 2026-01-23T15:41:01.891Z
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- it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest
reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will
infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.
Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this
experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for
ever.
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.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin
to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my
lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a
passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a
purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers
get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy
themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger;
nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction
of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all
honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory
in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I
never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously
buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old
Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the
mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
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