Swords and Plowshares/Outward Bound
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I
DAY is only skin-deep, but the open night strikes in to the soul and sets it free.
Oh, the freedom of night, when the brazen lid of day is taken off the world!
DAY is only skin-deep, but the open night strikes in to the soul and sets it free.
Oh, the freedom of night, when the brazen lid of day is taken off the world!
Crossing from Jersey in one of dear Walt's ferry-boats, we take a long course up the black North River between the dim, electric-lighted cities.
The sky is lurid with the reflection over mysterious twenty-storied Manhattan,
But above, above, the heavens extend themselves like the starry tail of a peacock, arched over his head by the wind, when he stamps his feet and quivers and spreads his gorgeous canopy before his enchanted mate, and his feathers rustle like the forest leaves in a gale.
The sky, too, is tremulous over me, and seems to rustle with inexpressible passion.
The sky is lurid with the reflection over mysterious twenty-storied Manhattan,
But above, above, the heavens extend themselves like the starry tail of a peacock, arched over his head by the wind, when he stamps his feet and quivers and spreads his gorgeous canopy before his enchanted mate, and his feathers rustle like the forest leaves in a gale.
The sky, too, is tremulous over me, and seems to rustle with inexpressible passion.
A small sailboat slides past in the dark, steering for the bay and the sea, and rising and falling on the harbor swell.
O tiny craft, with one lonely mariner, perhaps, under the palpitating stars, how little the million-headed city recks of you, or of the ocean or sky, or of aught but itself!
A narrow fringe of ships and wharves—the salt smell penetrating a scant hundred yards up the streets—and beyond that all mankind hopelessly landbound!
Brave solitary helmsman, keep your head to the sea; do not let the electric lights draw you away from the stars;
Sail on and study the constellations, until you learn that love hangs in solution in the universe, ready to precipitate itself in every heart that is impatient of base admixture.
II
IT is dangerous to set sail alone on the ocean of truth.
Many a skipper has gone mad on that lonely sea.
They whisper of icebergs and maelstroms and anti-diluvian monsters there.
If you must embark—if you feel irresistibly impelled to quit the dry land of the continent of superstition which is our world—it is wiser perhaps to hug the shore and never to leave the coast-line out of sight.
Its harbors of time-honored error are so familiar and homelike, while the perils of the high seas are so new and startling and vague!
It is so much more comfortable to be insane with the hoary insanities of the majority!
It is so reassuring to read the same delusions in the eyes of our friends!
The danger flag warning us not to go to sea is always flying from the signal-station.
And yet I flout the danger flag.
I am a man and out to sea will I go.
O tiny craft, with one lonely mariner, perhaps, under the palpitating stars, how little the million-headed city recks of you, or of the ocean or sky, or of aught but itself!
A narrow fringe of ships and wharves—the salt smell penetrating a scant hundred yards up the streets—and beyond that all mankind hopelessly landbound!
Brave solitary helmsman, keep your head to the sea; do not let the electric lights draw you away from the stars;
Sail on and study the constellations, until you learn that love hangs in solution in the universe, ready to precipitate itself in every heart that is impatient of base admixture.
II
IT is dangerous to set sail alone on the ocean of truth.
Many a skipper has gone mad on that lonely sea.
They whisper of icebergs and maelstroms and anti-diluvian monsters there.
If you must embark—if you feel irresistibly impelled to quit the dry land of the continent of superstition which is our world—it is wiser perhaps to hug the shore and never to leave the coast-line out of sight.
Its harbors of time-honored error are so familiar and homelike, while the perils of the high seas are so new and startling and vague!
It is so much more comfortable to be insane with the hoary insanities of the majority!
It is so reassuring to read the same delusions in the eyes of our friends!
The danger flag warning us not to go to sea is always flying from the signal-station.
And yet I flout the danger flag.
I am a man and out to sea will I go.