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- roaring round the old peak of Mull; and his long yellow hair waved
round his head like a sunset. My life for it, Jarl, thy ancestors were
Vikings, who many a time sailed over the salt German sea and the
Baltic; who wedded their Brynhildas in Jutland; and are now quaffing
mead in the halls of Valhalla, and beating time with their cans to the
hymns of the Scalds. Ah! how the old Sagas run through me!
Yet Jarl, the descendant of heroes and kings, was a lone, friendless
mariner on the main, only true to his origin in the sea-life that he
led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear
that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not sprung
of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up
your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your veins. All
of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels
for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed
with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all
generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the
hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and
principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space;
the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all,
brothers in essence—oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but
one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head. Then no more
let us start with affright. In a theocracy, what is to fear? Let us
compose ourselves to death as fagged horsemen sleep in the saddle. Let
us welcome even ghosts when they rise. Away with our stares and
grimaces. The New Zealander’s tattooing is not a prodigy; nor the
Chinaman’s ways an enigma. No custom is strange; no creed is absurd; no
foe, but who will in the end prove a friend. In heaven, at last, our
good, old, white-haired father Adam will greet all alike, and sociality
forever prevail. Christian shall join hands between Gentile and Jew;
grim Dante forget his Infernos, and shake sides with fat Rabelais; and
monk Luther, over a flagon of old nectar, talk over old times with Pope
Leo. Then, shall we sit by the sages, who of yore gave laws to the
Medes and Persians in the sun; by the cavalry captains in Perseus, who
cried, “To horse!” when waked by their Last Trump sounding to the
charge; by the old hunters, who eternities ago, hunted the moose in
Orion; by the minstrels, who sang in the Milky Way when Jesus our
Saviour was born. Then shall we list to no shallow gossip of Magellans
and Drakes; but give ear to the voyagers who have circumnavigated the
Ecliptic; who rounded the Polar Star as Cape Horn. Then shall the
Stagirite and Kant be forgotten, and another folio than theirs be
turned over for wisdom; even the folio now spread with horoscopes as
yet undeciphered, the heaven of heavens on high.
Now, in old Jarl’s lingo there was never an idiom. Your aboriginal tar
is too much of a cosmopolitan for that. Long companionship with seamen
of all tribes: Manilla-men, Anglo-Saxons, Cholos, Lascars, and Danes,
wear away in good time all mother-tongue stammerings. You sink your
clan; down goes your nation; you speak a world’s language, jovially
jabbering in the Lingua-Franca of the forecastle.
True to his calling, the Skyeman was very illiterate; witless of
Salamanca, Heidelberg, or Brazen-Nose; in Delhi, had never turned over
the books of the Brahmins. For geography, in which sailors should be
adepts, since they are forever turning over and over the great globe of
globes, poor Jarl was deplorably lacking. According to his view of the
matter, this terraqueous world had been formed in the manner of a tart;
the land being a mere marginal crust, within which rolled the watery
world proper. Such seemed my good Viking’s theory of cosmography. As
for other worlds, he weened not of them; yet full as much as
Chrysostom.
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