'As the Swift Ships'

I

THEY pass me suddenly as I walk along the beach at night, enjoying the solitude and terrors of darkness, the wind cooling my hair to the roots, and the voice of the sea a steady singing and roaring in my ears. Like flakes of snow in a flaw, like white petals in a gust, they flee rapidly past my shoulder and vanish with a faint, wild cry in the night. But the white they show me is not the white of snowflakes or of petals; it is soft, pure down, fine indeed as the down a snowflake might form with its stiff crystals on a black cloth, but living and ruffling in a blow as the foam is ruffled when the wind drives over the rocks. And it covers warm breasts and sides, like a jacket, for they are the sandpipers, and it is the white beneath their wings that I see as I walk along in the darkness.

They summer in the lakes, and first come to the beach in the autumn. I cannot say precisely when they begin to appear, but always a little before they are expected they have come. It is one of the notes of autumn to be ready early. It is the season of wistfulness, and takes us unaware and unprepared. The chant begins before we are willing to hear it, full of glory as the long lament of color and the rising elegy of winds may be. It reminds us that our own days are falling before we have ripened our strength. ‘They are passed away as the swift ships,’ and we begin to see in autumn that their poetry is in their flight. We let them go as carelessly as chips in a millstream, but they are chips afloat on great tides. Nature and matter lie fathomless all about them, illusion bears them on through predetermined dreams, and at some incredible time they must ex - pire altogether. The sandpipers always come before they are expected.

One sees a little troop of them running along the beach with quick legs, bobbing down suddenly as if their feet had met an obstruction while their heads kept on going by a quaint momentum, How indescribably comic is their progress over the sand! A little thrust sets them off; their feet twinkle back and forth in a blur of speed while they advance stiffly over the wet plane of the beach. Suddenly all this forward motion completely stops without in the least retarding by way of preparation; except the head, with its inch-long bill, which describes an arc that carries it. accurately to the seizure of some mote or invisible atom of sustenance, the object of this picturesque attack. To see a group of them, with sparkling minute brown eyes and cocked heads, performing these tiny operations with community skill, is to open one’s mouth impolitely wide with the laughter that springs straight out of nature, the honest amazement of one creature at the oddity of another.

Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh, sends his hero, who has come completely to grief through ignorance of the world and of himself, to watch the elephants at the zoo for the restoration of his moral faculties. Elephants, I think, could well communicate the touch of nature which a sick soul might need. Fundamental humor and a large capacity for tolerance might easily be bred in the observer of their habits. But it might as well have been sandpipers, with the addition of autumn air and the wet, firm beach underfoot; long lines of breakers tumbling, as it. seems, at the eye level of the solitary walker, and mounting each other’s shoulders as they burst into white and hurl shoreward. Perhaps when the birds take flight, a sharpwinged little flock piping faintly as they whirl off in the wind, the hero may feel a wistfulness which elephants could not inspire; but let him plunge his senses deep in the autumn air, and the wistfulness will do no harm.

Cardinal Newman spent much subtlety in distinguishing the notes of the true church. Autumn is a kind of lusty and undogmatic church, a sacrament in the blood which sets it singing through the veins, and its notes may be palpably gathered by the walker along the beach. They need no calendar to pronounce their authenticity, nor college of ecclesiastics to dispute them into tenets and ratify their virtue with formalities. About the efficacy of grace in this church, no communicant need trouble his conscience; he drinks it in and it warms him. The same grace is in wine. He may even repeat, as his foot presses the resilient sand: —

But along the beach he must take these lines as a symbol of autumn in general, and not of the landscape as he sees it bleakly spread before him. No trees are in sight; the only plain is a long crescent of sand, the only hill a dull promontory like a finger pointing out to sea; and while there are colors aplenty, they are not such as these lines evoke. The beach is desolate. Colors are poured down on it from above, from the sun and the broken floes of cloud. The walker is not ten minutes from a crowded street, but his view is cut off by bleak, rude wastes of land and water; on one side by the crest of the beach, where the sand topples like a breaking wave and is crowned with lank blades of grass, stiff as swords and sharper; on the other side, seas lift and struggle, forcing their way against a land breeze, which breaks them into lips and roughnesses like half-chiseled granite. And these waves whirl with a green too intense and hardy to be pleasant except to rugged senses, and with the harshest degrees of purple. White veils of spray stream from their tops, as smoke is blown backward from the funnel of a rolling ship. Gulls with glistening wings circle keenly in a glittering ether. One of the notes of autumn along the beach is the colors of the sea, distinct alike from the blue days of summer and the black winter storms. In autumn, emerald greens, areas of purple like gigantic wings, a bay full of bluster and whitecaps and racing shadows of clouds, and a bright ether flowing over the face of the walker as if it were the unending river of life!

The sandpipers, when they are not chased by quixotic dogs and are not engaged in their comical pursuit of food, stand in a little cluster like berries and go to sleep on one leg. Some prefer two; no doubt they were born with a gift for attending to business, and their native sense of the picturesque has atrophied. But often a large part of the flock poise each upon one slender twig — so slender that it can really be no more than a conventional straight line drawn in brown ink to connect them for our comfort with the earth, and save the brotherhood of science from walking out one day and finding a community floating at rest above the sand with their heads tucked under their wings. How they preserve balance on this interpolated leg, which is off centre, might indeed offer the scientist an evening’s pleasant speculation.

Creatures of air, sharp-winged, softfeathered pipers and flutterers by day and night, have they no need of balance? Observation soon reveals that they have. Watch them on windy days, and you will see that they are half swung about and almost whirled off altogether when their feathers are caught the wrong way by the breeze. This is when their tails point into the wind. The soft down beneath their wings, fine as feathers of snow, is awkwardly ruffled by an adverse current. You will see them running with the wind, rumpled feathers and all. doing their best to keep their tails in line with their heads, until they chance upon a molecule of nourishment, which only their bright brown eyes, cheerfully serious, can detect. Let such a speck come in view, and they round it promptly as if it were a buoy. So, coming up into the wind, they bob down their bills with secure and neatly fitting jackets unrumpled by the tides of air.

II

When the sky is in bluster on a bright autumn afternoon, the beach is universally active. The air crackles with its myriad points of light, the sea leaps, the wind blows life into the cheeks and thoughts of the walker. He hears a thousand voices — half-articulate inner sounds of wind, wave, bird cries, the rushing of his own blood, words blown into his brain from old songs and laments, forgotten harmonies, mysterious because the brain cannot reproduce their natural intervals — and hears them wilder than they are, like a voice echoing in a glen. Or, if the lots are cast in favor of coherence, he may discourse to himself much more clearly. He may see the point of human institutions and affairs with new humor and perspicacity, and criticize them fearlessly. He may settle his metaphysical tenets for as long as an hour. The clean-winged gulls are slitting bright arcs in the bluest of air over the greenest of waves, the long crescent expanse of rusty-red, desolate sand lies ready for eager legs to pace. Neither authority, nor the weight of weariness or convention, nor the necessity of pleading to a special audience, even of one and that one agreeable, can dull or impose unfair conditions upon the flow of wit and spontaneous criticism in which the mind may delight.

Unfortunately, thoughts at such times are deceptive. One lends his heart freely to the great realm of sensation or illusion by which life is manifested to itself, and lending one’s self freely to illusion is little else but dreaming. The intellect may blush to acknowledge in a later hour the figments that amused it when the flesh bounded with the stings of autumn, and the white sails bellied out on a blue horizon. But another side of the case is at least possible. The brain has been active and free while the body was eager and sane, and the accumulated results of many such experiences may well be to sink a few vital reflections and affinities of taste, and perhaps a conscious source of moral strength, deep into the mind. Literature and the mind live by the expression of eternal attitudes, and the love of nature is eternal. It is a disposition of the whole man, of the sum of his instincts and the desire of his heart. What would be the air without birds, or the earth without the seat

Birds, of course, are one of the notes of which I am making so incomplete and indolent a list. Besides the gulls and the sandpipers, there are the ducks. They may be seen in the waves along the beach throughout the winter. Their particular skill is to ride the breaking crests in the shallows, rising half a dozen times their height on the slope of a wave, and vanishing undisturbed down the other side. If the wave, with its white forelock, threatens to break too soon and bowl them over, they rise promptly with a stroke of their webs, plunge down a quick bill, and plop beneath the surface with a brief show of heels, just in time to avoid the crumbling descent of a rolling green wall of foam. Or at sunset one may see them as he returns from his walk. The crest of the beach stands cold and rude, shadowing all the brown sand to the edge of the tide. Overhead there is still a clear blue, a staggering collection of atoms or tiny motes of sparkling light. Through this ether races the wind, and little troops of snipe whirl over with sharp, fluttering wings. Above them ducks in twos and threes plunge through the sky with outstretched necks, like winged ninepins. One can hear the whistling of their pinions as they pass; they scrape the air with the friction of their flight.

Another note of autumn is its clouds. There are chill days when all motion is arrested in the air and overhead. The sky is full of monsters, rolled and ragged shapes hanging in still suspension, with edges of sunny yellow, bellies of purple and brown, and horny protuberances of a dozen hues. From the fissures and smaller interstices of the clouds, long beams of dusty light slant through the air, and always there are clear lakes of blue lying like a glimpse of open sea from harbor. How to express the blue of these lakes! They are a theme for Melville’s pen; they set the eyes to singing, they are like the wings of a dove to fly far away and be at rest. In the lower floes of cloud, which curtain the air thickly above the sea, comes a gap; and beyond, deeper in the sky, lighter and thinner clouds extend into the gap, like sand washed with a faint sunlight, and form the shores of the blue lake. But deep beyond all thought, infinitely far and pure, wholly detached and free from all human circumstance, the lake itself swims, of such a young forgetful blue as if God had made it in the youth of His days and the freshness of His love for the peace of all created souls.

III

The wisdom which a man may find in nature is so sane, so innocent, and so simple, that he need never defend it. Half his world will understand him, and that is enough for the most jealous persuasion. They will understand him the better if he does not attempt to speak. The best defense he could make of any cherished habit of thought or enjoyment, germane and natural as it appeared to himself, might only distort and disenchant his sympathies to others. By the aid of humility, he may come to see that the others are right, that his expressed opinions were really delusions, foreign to the instincts he thought they defended. There is little enough that any of us can understand, and of what we can the inarticulate is more significant. Creeds and faiths explicitly pledged mislead both those who maintain them and those who point out their idiosyncrasies; but such mistakes and inadequacies of human utterance are superficial. They should teach us to allow for a difference between what a man says that he believes and what the true sources of his nature ought to lead him to believe and say that he believes, if he knew himself well enough, or could be thoroughly consistent and free from confusions. And we must admit that unless we were deceived in ourselves and in others, unless creeds were only half articulate and reasons often false, life would be intolerable, or at least wholly different from human, and no character could be winsome. Our most understanding humor comes from sharing our foibles; friendliness and courage are bred from a common struggle for truth and a common sincerity in our blindness.

But while the wisdom of nature needs no defense, the lover of nature may badly need to defend it, simply because profound instincts urge him toward expression. There is in man as a race an impulse to find out truth, to make all experience articulate; and this impulse, with its moral implications, is more serious than life itself, which for the most part passes in vanity or anticipation. Let a man take pen in hand, then, and protect himself from vanity by what means he may! A lover of nature who invited all the world to go walking with him would be disabused of one sort of vanity in ten minutes. But he may publish his walks to the world, and let his own find him as they will. Poets defend poesie, although of the making of books there is no end.

In autumn along the beach we shall learn that man is a natural creature. His eye was made to delight in birds as they fly, to trace the patterns of foam on the green hollow of a rising wave. His instincts are elemental, designed for his happiness and perpetuation. If they are confused by a too intricate society, he is led on to wretchedness. Yet if they were never complicated or opposed, ambition would never fructify. The principle in man’s life which produces engines and weapons, builds cities, refines the intellect, dissects the body, the instinct which is the nourishing root of civilization, may seem a thwart and a burden to the simple love of beauty and impulsive enjoyment of the world as it appears to the senses. But this instinct is the one means of apprehending the hidden motions and habits behind the appearances of nature, of framing them to purposes which reason or the hope of progress may require. It is the one means of attempting to discover the conditions of a permanent good. From it springs all that is serious in the human drama, great achievements, great aspirations, great tragedies; and thus it enriches the materials of contemplation, to which at last the mind must escape for satisfaction and understanding. Man needs winds to blow through his hair and salt to sting his flesh as he needs poetry, of which they are the source, for the higher unities of his spirit, without which ambition would become an effort never chastened by rest, never enlightened and refreshed by the presence of beauty.

Like history, nature cannot be depended upon to teach any given lesson, for she is just as apt to give her authority to both sides. The observer comes to her predetermined toward certain conclusions, or with questions which, if she were to undertake them, she would propose to herself in a very different guise. No doubt she will modify the notions he brings her, but he himself will largely be the source of their final good or evil. Her wisdom is addressed to a court beyond his view. He comes to her for light, and she gives him the measureless fluid gray of the sea at evening, interfused with a luminous pale yellow which breathes from every point of its tranquil surface; or she pours down the windy colors of sunset on his head. Wordsworth divines in her

Walt Whitman learns ‘to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals,’ or ‘to be the free channel of himself.’ Striding along the autumn sand, we may take our own measure in the presence of nature. Any thought must gain honesty and humility from a walk beneath her spacious arches of night and day. To unimpeded minds, with an easy taste for life, nature may teach impulsive ethics, enough to gratify the successive episodes of an earthly career within their own compass. But to those who cannot be free channels of themselves, who need the restraint of deeper reflections, nature may offer beauty and resignation in which their liberty may be found.

The sandpiper running on the beach with his bright brown eye is an instant in a vast natural force; presently he will whirl away, and we shall see him no more, though others of his kind may make autumnal journeys to our coast. We ourselves are moments in a flow of life, an expanding river of human consciousness which is immeasurable, inevitable, and blind. By watching the stars, breathing the tides, we learn palpably with our senses a little of the breadth and the minute exactness of the forces which determine all things. Not a molecule of the rising wave is exempt from the energy which shapes the whole mass; the most careless and fine-blown curve of spray flying like a mane from a breaking crest, is distributed to the last drop by necessary affinities in matter. Yet how wild, restless, and moving is the sea! Life is all illusion; it is a game played for an ulterior purpose, to maintain generations endlessly. ‘All nature paints like the harlot.’ — colors, bright winds, whatever forms exist for the eye or harmonies for the ear, all that we accept as the tangible presence of things or properties of things, are in reality but a language of imagination, the properties of our response to a world of which science gives a very different report. Thus does nature equivocate with our perceptions, and build us life out of dreams.

That the sea with its bursting hues, the outlines of beach and promontory stained with bright autumn tints, that all impressions of sense are not nature herself, presenting her works to our direct view, but a pictured world, the romance of our own organs, springing out of nature perhaps, yet in no way resembling her, comes at first as a hard saying. But time enrolls this reflection among the most easy and familiar. Without illusion no creature could exist, no knowledge could be possible. Illusion is the whole source of beauty and of mental life. Nor does this recognition detract in any way from the reality of pleasure and pain, of good and evil. That nature equivocates with us is not a reason that we should equivocate with her, or with each other. We are not called upon to retaliate with deceitful morals toward our fellow men or toward our own minds. Life may be the substance of a dream, as poets have declared; but we may act in its course honestly, and treasure its great dramas of hope or ambition for whatever may make them worthy to be acted or felt. Nor shall we be the less resolved for the autumn walk with nature which has showed us how existence feeds upon illusion. From seeing thus clearly, we shall return to labor more cheerfully and intelligently. We shall play our small romances in another spirit, perhaps, beholding them under the aspect of eternity as only brief, fitful themes which by some miracle are continually vested with enchantment. From the signs of beauty which nature makes to us in stars and in the sea, our thoughts may borrow dignity and nativeness; and in the end we may be more ready to put off the garments of illusion, and go to sleep.

IV

Night transforms the work of day, and if we extend our autumn walks into the darkness we shall meet novel adventures. Pace out on the beach when the air flows with a deep, steady pressure against your shoulders. No stars are overhead; the world vanishes into a black and bottomless ether. The sand is black and wet underfoot; an appearance of light hovers faintly above it by contrast. Successive waves break into white foam out of the invisible ocean, and mount above each other in tiers, stretching out a mile in length on either hand. A deep roaring and rushing of spray chants continually to seaward; the entire night moves and blusters in the air, as if it had struck its tents and were flowing across the world to settle in a new place. You urge forward against this opposing current, with blowing hair, cool cheeks, and leaping blood. Suddenly you stop and start with the shiver of beholding a phantom. At your side, almost at your feet, pale in the darkness, a milkwhite river streams noiselessly over the sand. Out of the night before you, at the limit of your vision, the river appears, and runs into the night behind with a long, unwavering speed. A shift of the wind suddenly broadens it. The stream sweeps out like the skirts of a dancer, and you stand in the midst of it. Then you remember that often by daylight you had seen the loose, fine sand blowing in long, ankle-deep drifts down the curve of the beach, and you sigh with relief and astonishment.

Bend down your ear, and the flying particles will bring only the faintest whisper. Put your hand in the drift, and your skin will barely tickle with their impact. So light and impalpable is the stream that you will scarcely believe it actual. Like moonlit clouds combed out across the sky, the white river flies out of the darkness, now beside your path, now catching your ankles in its rapid sweep, and if you turn your back you will see it beginning at your heels and vanishing away from you in the night with a smooth, aerial velocity, a swift, visionary flight speeding in perfect silence, an hourglass for your meditation. You walk as if among moonlit clouds in the deep sky; sea and night, earth and existence, play only an accompaniment of luxurious dream.

And again your mind is suddenly arrested in its laboring wonder and delight. A little flight of downy breasts hurries by, and a faint, wild call follows back on the wind into which tin? invisible brown wings have struggled. You cannot now see the bright eyes or the quivering wing-tips, and only when the flock is whirled in an eddy that almost blows them over can you catch a brief glimpse of the white jackets of down fleeing past, your shoulder. But you know that the symbol of all wistful desires, all hopes that can only be expressed by the fluttering of wings, all sympathies of the heart which are mute, unfathomable, and strange, has quickened your eyes for an instant as you stride along your mysterious road in the night.