As once, long since, when all the docks were filled
With that sea beauty man has ceased to build.”
Listen, now, for this is the message of the poem:
“They mark our passage as a race of men,
Earth will not see such ships again,—”
which makes me thank Heaven for my farm, where the same old romantic hoe remains about what it ever was—the first recorded wedding present.
Mr. Masefield’s observations are dated 1912. Prior to that year real clipper ships rode the deep, and real romance. It was prior to 1839 that there were real frontiers and romance in the land, and a last house (a government lighthouse) still to be set up in the suburbs of Astoria City. Going a little farther back, we find that prior to 1491 (B.C.), about the year 4000 according to the margin of the King James Version, there were giants in the earth, and the stories in the Book of Genesis show that there were romances as well as giants in those days. But, like Thoreau and Masefield, Moses was born fatally late. I feel sorry for Moses and my niece.
Let us pause here for a sad brief moment in order to see just where Moses was when Life sought him out and proffered him a magical chance in the shape of a trip to Egypt. Where was Moses? and what was he doing? To begin with, he was keeping goats, a fairly common occupation in those days, though rather a rare job now. But that was not all: Moses was keeping these goats for Jethro, his father-in-law. Now you begin to get some inkling as to where Moses was. But this is not the worst of it: for Moses was keeping the goats for his father-in-law on “the back side of the desert.” One would certainly say that the front side of any desert would be far enough away, and sterile enough of romance, if one had to keep one’s father-in-law’s goats there; but to keep the goats of your father-in-law on the back side of a desert is to be farther off than Hingham, or any place I know. And here was Moses when Life came upon him offering him an escape into Egypt.
He was born fatally late, Moses was, just like Thoreau and my niece. He might have been one of my own college men, so like a college man’s was his answer!