CHAPTER XXI.
AFTER ICEBERGS AGAIN.—AMONG THE SEA-FOWL.
Saturday, July 2. It is five o’clock, and the morning has kindled in the clouds its brightest fires. We are moving off to sea gracefully before a fair, light wind. The heart delights in this golden promise of a fine summer day, and the blue Atlantic all before us. As the rising sun looks over it, the glittering waves seem to participate in these joyful emotions. How marvelously beautiful is this vast scene! Give me the sea, I say, now that I am on the sea. Give me the mountains, I say, when I am on the mountains! Henceforth, when I am weary with the task of life, I will cry, Give me the mountains and the sea.
The rugged islands, landward, have only an olive, not the living green, and seem never to have rejoiced in the blessing of a tree, or felt the delicious mercy of a leafy shade. There blow the whales, and here is the edge of an innumerable multitude of sea-birds feeding upon the capelin, and flying to the right and left, thick as grasshoppers, as we advance among them. Poor things, they are so glutted that they are obliged to disgorge before they can gain the wing, and many of them merely scramble aside a few yards, and become the mark of the roguish sailors, especially of Sandy, our young Scotch cook, who is in a perfect frolic, pelting them with stones. They sprinkle the sea by the million, and present, with their white breasts and perpetually arching wings, a lively and novel appearance. On the roll of the swells, as the sunlight glances on them, they flash out white like water-lilies.
How the pages of a book fail to carry these scenes into the heart! I have been reading of them for years, and, as I have thought, reading understandingly and feelingly; but I can now say that I have never known, certainly never felt them until now. The living presence of them has an originality, a taste and odor for the imagination, which can never be expressed even by the vivid and sensuous language of the painter, much less by the more subtle, intellectual medium of written records. It is so new and fresh to me, that I feel as if none had ever seen this prospect before. Old and familiar as these waters are, I am thrilled with emotions, kindred to those of a discoverer, and remember and repeat the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Silent sea! This is any thing but that. The surf, which leaps up with the lightness and rapidity of flames, for many and many a white mile, roars among the sharp, bleak crags of the islands and the coast like mighty cataracts. Words of the Psalmist fall naturally upon the tongue, and I speak them in low tones to myself:
Voices are heard among them.
Their sound is gone out into all lands.
“And so sail we,” this glorious morning, after the icebergs, several of which stand sentinel along our eastern horizon; but we do not turn aside for them, for the reason that we confidently look for others more closely on our proper track.