THE PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND.
A ship-building community.
In the plain, simple regions we are describing,—where the sea is the great avenue of active life, and the pine forests are the great source of wealth,—ship-building is an engrossing interest, and there is no fête that calls forth the community like the launching of a vessel.
And no wonder; for what is there belonging to this workaday world of ours that has such a never-failing fund of poetry and grace as a ship? A ship is a beauty and mystery wherever we see it: its white wings touch the region of the unknown and the imaginative; they seem to us full of the odors of quaint, strange, foreign shores, where life, we fondly dream, moves in brighter currents than the muddy, tranquil tides of every day.
Who that sees one bound outward, with her white breasts swelling and heaving, as if with a reaching expectancy, does not feel his heart swell with a longing impulse to go with her to the far-off shores? Even at dingy, crowded wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, the coming in of a ship is an event that can never lose its interest. But on these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the blue sea lies embraced in the arms of a dark, solitary forest, the sudden incoming of a ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance.... The very life and spirit of strange, romantic lands come with her; suggestions of sandalwood and spice breathe through the pine woods; she is an Oriental queen, with hands full of mystical gifts; “all her garments smell of myrrh and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made her glad.” No wonder men have loved ships like birds, and that there have been found brave, rough hearts that in fatal wrecks chose rather to go down with their ocean love than to leave her in the last throes of her death-agony.
A ship-building, a ship-sailing community has an unconscious poetry ever underlying its existence. Exotic ideas from foreign lands relieve the trite monotony of life; the ship-owner lives in communion with the whole world, and is less likely to fall into the petty commonplaces that infest the routine of inland life.
Repression.
There is a class of people in New England who betray the uprising of the softer feelings of our nature only by an increase of outward asperity—a sort of bashfulness and shyness leaves them no power of expression for these unwonted guests of the heart—they hurry them into inner chambers and slam the doors upon them, as if they were vexed at their appearance.
The Sabbath.
A vague, dream-like sense of rest and Sabbath stillness seemed to brood in the air. The very spruce-trees seemed to know that it was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward with their dusky fingers, and the small tide-waves that chased each other up on the shelly beach, or broke against projecting rocks, seemed to do it with a chastened decorum, as each blue-haired wave whispered to his brother, “Be still—be still.”...
Not merely as a burdensome restraint, or a weary endurance came the shadow of that Puritan Sabbath. It brought with it all the sweetness that belongs to rest, all the sacredness that hallows home, all the memories of patient thrift, of sober order, of chastened yet intense family feeling, of calmness, of purity, and self-respecting dignity, which distinguished the Puritan household. It seemed a solemn pause in all the sights and sounds of earth.
Early New England society.
The state of society in some of the districts of Maine, in these days, much resembled, in its spirit, that which Moses labored to produce in ruder ages. It was entirely democratic, simple, grave, hearty, and sincere,—solemn and religious in its daily tone, and yet, as to all material good, full of wholesome thrift and prosperity. Perhaps taking the average mass of the people, a more healthful and desirable state of society never existed. Its better specimens had a simple, Doric grandeur, unsurpassed in any age.