From Shore to Shore

HOW it happens that I, with whom local ties are so tenacious that to move my household gods is one of the extreme miseries, and to pack my trunk for a long journey worse than sitting down to have a tootli drawn, who have neither ambition of fame or money, should, in the course of my fortyodd years, have made the passage of the Atlantic fifteen times, each time with worse weariness and ennui, — I am at this day, even, unable to explain to myself. It must be that the mighty new-home-seeking impulse which uprooted the insular natures of our Puritan forefathers (mine did n’t come by the Mayflower, but followed the same law and necessity, and were of Roger Williams’s band) was of such vitality and so greatly against the grain, that, like all practices against nature, it became part of nature, and perpetuated itself as a congenital habit. Did I not know my parentage as far back as it is permitted a good republican to trace his, I should believe that my blood had had a cross with that of the Wandering Jew.

At times malaise possesses me as the need to tell his story did the Ancient Mariner ; a spirit of unrest seizes me, doing what I may be, and will not be laid without a journey. Twenty-one years ago, — it does not seem so long to recall,— I took the first liberty of my majority, girt up my loins, and went out into the world. Nothing more naïve is in biography than that voyage. I had sold a picture for thirty dollars, and determined to go to London to spend the money, studying the landscape painters of England. I used to be ashamed to tell it ; but now that I have learned to look back to the childlike faith and enthusiasms of that time as better than any which my digestion of the fruit of Eden’s fatal tree will ever permit me this side Lethe, I do not fear to recount how, having had a passage given me by a ship-owner who knew my family, I took my six sovereigns in my pocket, and a little trunk which I carried on my own shoulder, and went to try the lands beyond the sea, in the tranquil faith that, when my last shilling was gone, I should find a passage home as easily as I found one away.

To me, then, the world was smooth and fair and true ; I lived within the limits of the four rivers of which Euphrates was chief. To doubt, to suspect, to deceive, were things which had not yet come to me ; I was only a fullgrown child. But my own unsuspecting confidence in what I should find there, difficult now to realize if I had not the record of word and deed to make it certain by, is to me less incomprehensible than the unconcern of my friends. When I told my mother that 1 was going, and how, she only thought to pray for my safe return ; to urge me to give up my plan never came to her. The world, the hobgoblin of her Puritan village life, protection against which she had prayed for so many years, seemed to have lost its terrors. Only while she sat darning my stockings, putting buttons to my shifts, watching and care-taking in the woman’s ways, I could see her lips moving silently, and now and then she would furtively put the stocking up to her cheek, lest I might see the tear she could not quite keep back. And I, full of resultless activity, taking up and putting down again, thinking only of my air castles, — did I smile at her tears and tremulousness ? Well, I was young, and had never been far from her constant care ; I was even a little cruel, for I hummed as if to myself, “ It may be for aye,and it maybe forever” ; and the poor soul could endure it no longer. She broke into tears, moaning “O, don’t, don’t, my boy.” It was but for a moment; her bitter woman’s life had taught her to hide emotion. And when she had sat alone long, and forgot that any one was near her, fragments of her prayers and thoughts would find their way into unconscious words ; and I heard her saying to herself as if in answer to a doubtful suggestion, “No, he is too pure-hearted : the world will not get him.” I was the youngest of nine, all gone heavenward or worldward before then. Scarce was it a wonder that she over-esteemed me, yet that unconscious expression of faith in me has stood me in stead more than once.

And that morning, after making my way out to the ship through the drifting ice of the Hudson, as we turned our bows seaward, I wished that I had not come. On another occasion of the uneasy spirit’s seizing me, years before, her tears had kept me at home; and as I watched the snow-clad heights of Staten Island sink in the west, I knew that the tears kept back till I could no longer see them were flowing as I had never caused them to flow before. How in the bitter hard life of us wandering men, scornful of tears and tenderness alike, there comes back now and then a memory which undoes us, when the child is master of the man ! That night as I lay in my uncared-for bed I wet my pillow with tears, forgotten with the sunrise at sea.

Many voyages we make, but that first has never its peer. People then travelled with leisure ; they sailed, and took the chances of time and tide. To those who find the sea an enemy, the times have bettered ; but to my enthusiasm of painter, the loitering of the old Garrick was a new life. I rose early to see the sunrise, and passed my days on deck, neither calm nor storm interfering in the least with the pure and perfect enjoyment of the sensations of life, the impressions of the elements. I tried to paint, but I enjoyed so much the mere existence, that no occupation could add a charm to it. I painted a sky, and left the waves to wash themselves out; if I began to draw a cloud, I watched it unrolling, piling, melting, changing, and found that it was not what I began to draw, and postponed the lesson. My curiosity and interest in the great ocean never failed me ; each day was like the other in delight: if it blew, the waves were finer ; if it was calm, the air was balmier. Filled with traditions and fancies of the sea, I watched, every moment expecting to see some new wonder; vigilant-eyed, as far-seeing and wide awake as any sailor of them all, I missed nothing. Sunrise and moonrise; sunsets rosy and gray ; noondays white, blinding, lustrous ; stormy nights, and days of dead calm ; — I studied imperturbably their meanings. I was enamored of nature, and nature alone. I sought, not for ulterior ends, but in pure love, some hidden sense ; all to me was mystic and illusive. My enchantments were not dead then ; I was in Paradise, for everything I saw was perfect in its kind.

For days a gentle southwest wind blew, and, with all sail set and a mild air on deck, we swept along. People who have only travelled in steamers cannot know the charms which the sea may have. The profound and unbroken silence of these days when we, with a top-sail breeze and a scarcely perceptible roll, drifted on our way — no jar, no clatter, no smoke, nor settling of flakes of soot all over the deck, but with nature’s own motion — through the sparkling seas, was so impressive, that all my subsequent voyages have only made the recollection of it more distinct. I climbed to.the mast-head, whence the ship looked like a yawl, and the sea an immense river gliding past us ; the huge yards and labyrinthine tackle seeming too much for the narrow hull to balance, and the whole mass more lost than ever in the waste of dancing white caps. All was new and wonderful to me, losing for the first time sight of mother earth ; yet in one thing I was disappointed, as I have been ever since as often as I have attempted it, in realizing the immensity of the ocean, of which I have heard so much. The glimpses of a sea horizon seen from the land have always been far more potent on the imagination than this all-sided stretch of unmitigated waters. My imagination is not wholly irresponsive to the circumstance, but it has never succeeded in realizing more than the sea horizon when at sea. You see the lift of the wave to the very edge, where the evidence of all sense leaves you, and however you may know or

I can’t comprehend. I am slow to believe that any imaginative perception of the hugeness of ocean ever came from seeing all that can be seen from any point. Once on a later voyage I remember to have caught a twilight impression of its immensity, steaming on a glassy sea at the rate of fourteen knots into gathering mists where no horizon was visible, realizing better the imaginative conditions than anything definite could. It was momentary, a gleam of the infinite, but so mighty and overpowering to all other conceptions of time or space, that though never repeated I have never forgotten it. But this was not the fruit of seeing, rather of not seeing, of mystery and darkness more than hugeness. Yet, though I missed the expanse, I learned in a few days to appreciate the fitness of what seem to me the finest words spoken of the open ocean, —

This and no other is the legend of the every-day, interminable, and unchangeable (save by more or less) open sea.

Our captain, one of the old school, a Cape Cod boy, —cabin boy once, then seaman, mate, and master, — owned a part of his ship and treated her tenderly. He did n’t believe in great circle sailing, or trouble himself much about ocean currents ; he could “ work a lunar,’ reckon his latitude and longitude from the stars if necessary, sound his way into New York Harbor in the densest fog that ever lay, calculate all risks ; and he woke every hour in the night to look at the telltale compass which hung over the head of his bed, with a lamp burning over it to show him the bearings. He had taken all the degrees in swearing known to sea-masonry: and the outbursts of profane violence with which I have heard him at midnight salute a helmsman who had deviated a point from the course, were fearful. But to his passengers—there were two—he was all that was gentlemanly and seamanly at once.

Sailing by Mercator, our course was that known as the southerly, and we ran into warm weather very soon and the sea wonders of the Gulf Stream. The strange illumination of the seas which sailors call “breaming,” I saw then as I have never since seen it, — the sea alight wherever it broke, and, up to the top-sail yards, the spars and rigging lit by it ; the foam at the bows and the waves parting at the sides all in molten silver, seething, tumbling ; the vague, unlighted forms of the waves of one moment becoming the pyrotechnic marvel of the next, wreathed in luminous foam-fringes, brightening as if from some far-off reflected lightning flash, some contagious awakening to electric life, and then falling back into darkness again,— light from the dark, fire from water

And so we loitered into dead calm ; wind passing to the south brought spring-time, and then left it to us. Amongst the most precious gifts of nature to myself, is a vivid recollection of the sensations of my childhood, of the delight which nature gave me ; and, of these sensations, the most enrapturing was that which the returning spring brought me, — the mild balmy days on which I watched for the first hepatica, and heard the farm cock crow as if he had been voiceless all winter ; and this southerly calm recalled to me in all its melting charm one of those best spring days ; it seemed like the return of the best and most perfect day of my most careless year. I climbed up on the wheel-house and lay on my back, looking into the dark blue sky, against which the idle sails shone white in the sun, flapping against the masts ; and the sea-gulls, circling round the stern, came to see what I might be, and nearer and nearer until I could see their dove eyes as they turned, first one and then the other, to get better knowledge of me, and, unalarmed by any motion, finally came so near that I could almost have caught them.

Trifles of sense, bubbles of sentiment, all these to sober men ; but, then and there nothing was needed to make life perfect but that it should be life and leave me to myself. I felt as if the voyage were to the Fortunate Isles, and the fascination of the day was enough to justify the magical influences poetically ascribed to the sea. I wished that the voyage might last three months ; but not that it might be all calm ; I had a stronger desire to see a gale, — the worst possible gale that left us safe. And our calm grew to a west wind, and the wind to a hard blow ; and then the gray watery clouds began to drift up and blacken the whole sky, and the tempest came down ; and for seven days each day was more stormy than its predecessor. Our ship danced like a wherry, and drove under close-reefed top-sails twelve knots an hour. Standing on the quarter-deck, no one dared leave his hold of rope or rail, lest the wind should whiff him off into the sea. The great waves gathered behind us and piled slowly up, until it seemed as if they must come aboard ; and finally, when the stern of the old ship caught the lift of the swell and rose to receive it, we went up until we overlooked the gray, driven tumult as from a tower.

And then from the crest of the wave we seemed to rush like coasters on a hillside, as the waters let us down into the valley of foam and bewilderment. The complication of motions, that of the wave receding yet carrying us with it forward, and the swing-like motion of rising and falling, not as a ship rolls or plunges in an ordinary sea, but with a sweep of hundreds of feet in every motion and a descent of forty feet,— a sidelong roll and a headlong rush; motions wild, unrestrained, in which we are the most helpless of all created things, in which successive dooms chased each other past us as if we were too trivial to be destroyed ; the driving, riotous billows, their summits crushed into foam by the weight of the gale, and the foam draggled along the black water till it seemed all froth and yeast; every pinnacle that sprang up where two waves met, driven away in spray, cut down, levelled as instantly as raised ; no combing waves there, for no wave could rise to comb, only great hills of water, crystalline with wavelets, streaked with spun foam, rushing past us at locomotive speed, out of the mist and spray-filled space behind into the mystery as deep before ; and our ship a dancing trifle on this infinitude of immensities, the wild water pouring over her bows one moment and climbing up at the stern to deluge the quarter-deck the next, — this was the tempest I had been longing to see, and I watched it hours together insatiate. No use to talk to me of sea painting after that! The muddy undulations of a Vandevelde, the harbor sublimities of a Stanfield, the opalescent magic of a Turner, are equally far, because infinitely far, from the power and sublimity of a gale on the wide ocean.

Our captain went anxiously up and down, all the quips and jests, with which he was wont to greet us, dead on his lips. He ordered all hands aloft to take in the maintop-sail. How men could hold on seemed to me mysterious, but none fell ; spreading cautiously out on the huge yard, they tugged at the flapping and threshing sail; the captain shouted through the trumpet, and his words seemed blown away like the flame of a candle ; while the reply of the mate at the weather earing floated down from a height like snow-flakes from a cloud, so faint we could hardly catch them. Twenty minutes it took them to get in the one sail, and then, under close-reefed foretop-sail and storm-sail, we ran the gale out.

Seven days ! — that was learning the sea! And when it was over, the captain told his fears. His thirty years of seafaring life had seen nothing worse than that, except a tornado. I thought myself peculiarly fortunate, and hoped to see the tornado beside. It had been my only experience of the sea which realized the ideal I had formed of it. It had disappointed me in size, or rather in not being infinite as I expected to feel it; its color was heavy, save when the crest of a wave or the boiling of the wake produced momentarily the exquisite turquoise color; elsewhere it reminded me always, and does still, of ink, or oblivion, or death. Mediterranean water and that of some lakes has a delicious shade of blue-green, like the tints in the clefts of glacier ice ; and in shallows, as in the straits of Messina, the white bottom makes this resplendent ; but the deep sea has nothing to give back,—lethean, irresponsive.

I have been for a large portion of my life in candid search for those great emotions and impressions of the elementary forces of which poets have sung, but have, to speak in sober honesty, found that all material elements fail in producing impressions in any way suggestive of infinity. Impressions of sense are measured by the sense, and no calculation beyond tangible demonstration will double the reach of the measure. To multiply our utmost by infinity does not make it greater. The power of the ocean is terrific, but far more so when excited on a rocky coast than it ever can be out in the open sea, and even on shore we feel its limitations. I think that the “ majesty of ocean ” is better known from solid footing ; its immensity can only be comprehended as a result of mathematical processes which can never be other than external in their effect. Only spiritual phenomena are capable of those mightier impressions which hint our relation to the infinite. I have been far more deeply impressed by the view of Mont Blanc from the summit of the aiguille de Varens, which I once got unexpectedly while chasing a chamois, than with all I ever saw of the ocean from sea or shore ; the glimpse of structural law, the hint of organizing intelligence, which crops out with the central granite, appeals to the soul of man with a more faithful call than the infinity of the stars or the inappreciable waste of waters. A good deal of nonsense prevails on the subject of the mightiness of God’s work and the insignificance of man’s. As if a man and his work were less God’s work than Mont Blanc, and as if the fact that man can work were not by far the most wonderful we know of all divine doings ! I take it that St. Mark’s is more wonderful than the whole chain of the Alps, and a landscape of Turner than the Bernese Oberland, by nearly as much as a baby is more admirable than a doll ; that Kepler is more divine than astronomy, Agassiz than the mer de glace, or Columbus than the sea. For more than twenty years I have in vain searched through the world for an emotion of sublimity such as has been given me by the faith and devotion of a woman’s soul.

How all the details of that first voyage come back to me so vividly, on this my fifteenth retracing of the old course, and why, I cannot divine. I remember the solemn indignation of the German professor, my fellow-passenger, with the crude theories and scientific pretensions of the American people, where every farmer insisted on cramming his ears with his notions of the mundane mechanism. He had gone to America a devoted republican, and came back a sickened monarchist, finding everybody insane from the insufficient Pierian draughts ; and so we quarrelled, and he took his side the quarter-deck and I mine. I remember, too, the earthly delight which came to me as we went up the Mersey and I saw the hills green and fresh as in our spring - time. I have never recalled these things before as now. Perhaps it is to point the contrast with this clattering, rumbling, quivering steamer — in which is neither comfort nor quiet thought, a traveller’s purgatory — that they come ; perhaps because the number of my years has doubled since then. The ghosts of these illusions and enthusiasms are a positive pain, — the first and last pages of my manhood, brought so sharply together, are too much like coming to judgment and seeing the roll of my misdeeds spread before me. These twenty-one added years and their results seem typified in the difference between that voyage and this, in which the narrow cabin and straitened deck of the Garrick, gay with enthusiasms and fancies, gives place to sumptuous saloon and flush deck, with cosmopolitan equipment of passengerhood, worn, gray-headed men, hurrying in heaviness of business pressure, eating, drinking, and killing time as though the voyage were an uneasy waking in their sleep, in which we commend ourselves to the charity of oblivion.

A care-worn clergyman seeking health, a German banker, ardent democrat full of enthusiasm for King William, merchants, all the needful dramatis personæ of the little comedy we can’t help taking part in; and, to keep us decorous, two Western women, — “ladies,” I had like to have said, but they are of the better type who know and claim the dignity of womanhood, — not young, for the silver hairs are coming in the black, but attractive as I have rarely seen women, with the sweetness and serenity of high content and habitual worship. Sea and sky, calm and storm, have passed by unnoticed in the dull round of the days, but these women have interested me as poems. If I were to paint an ideal of serenity, I would ask no better model than the elder of these two. Tall, lithe, and graceful, one of the figures which pays our sex the unconscious compliment of needing something to lean on, her face and form are wasted by illness, and the lines of riper womanhood fall into the harmony which expresses the sweet subordination of the life and its impulses to one divinizing purpose. Her eyes, large and dark gray, are set wide apart,—a rare and inestimable beauty in woman ; her lips, as red and full as her teens could have seen them, meet in clear, decided curves, which lose themselves in eddying masses, out of which come grave, earnest smiles flushing into dimpled cheeks and up to the mirth-lines under the eyes. Her face hinted her to be, what acquaintance proved, a woman of the purest type of American, such a one as no other country ever produces; Puritan without austerity, pure without being icy, upright without being uncharitable, self-reliant and sufficient to herself in case of need, without being repellant of aid and sympathy when it came. Her voice is deep, resonant, with an infinite capacity of laughter in its tone ; and the bitter experiences of womanly life, while strengthening and saddening her character, have not stifled altogether the mirth in it.

I said to myself, How beautiful she must have been when young ; and yet I see that no beauty of twenty could equal hers of —say, thirty-five, for I don’t know. All the passengers and even the officers yield to her attraction ; The German ejaculates, “Ach! bei — ; if only I was not married I would marry her.” A young Englishman hovers about her in a far-off admiration ; but, awed down by her sweet austerity, goes to chat and make friends with her younger sister. No one makes love to her ; she has too much of what seems to me the great fault of American women, a completeness of development which deprives the man of his best power, — protection. No true man cares to marry a perfect woman, to whom he would be a useless appendage ; but being himself one-sided, prays for that splendid and perfect one-sidedness which shall complete him. Our captain, who is an excellent sample of the Englishman, large, manly, with all a sailor’s enthusiasms for beautiful women, said of “ our lady passenger ” what sums up from the man’s side all that could be said : “ I admire her more than any woman I have seen ; but I would not care to love her, she can take care of herself too well.”

Had Dante had a prevision of steam, what a picture we might have had of Charon’s boat, — black, grimy, swallowing the earth and vomiting flame and smoke. Turner has made it almost sublime, but in his distances only ; nothing can make such a steamer as ours picturesque, with her immense formality, her length of precision and straight-sidedness ; or a voyage on her more than a transition, of which we earnestly desire brevity.

when a voyage at sea was a grave undertaking, there was a chance of finding interest in it; but now, with the tolerable certainty of ten days only from land to land, the charm of adventure, the fascination of the uncertain, is unknown. Steamers, packed with the discomforts of competition ; infested with gormandize, wine-drinking, and card-playing; invaded by the most vulgar motives of dislocation, haste, and fret; an enforced dead level of intercourse, the banality of the hotel driven into the familiarity of the household, — this is the Atlantic voyage of today.

Maybe the difference of my voyages is only the difference in years. What at twenty-one was charming and full of life and enjoyment, — life itself being then the most intense enjoyment, — is at forty-two only the dull and neutral background on which ambition draws its designs, — the stage scenery to the passion or gayety of the drama we make. Is there something in the returning cycle of manhood which makes the difference only that of a twenty-one years' drift from shore to shore, —

W. J. Stillman.