The seamen of the old times, ever hugging the shore, and anxiously marking every headland, were still more in need than we are of the friendly beacon light. The Etruscans, we are told, first kept the night-fires burning upon their sacred stones; the beacon was at once an altar, a temple, a column, and a watch tower. The Celts, too, had their round towers which were beacons also; the most important of them were built on precisely those points where the friendly light could most widely flash over the dark waters; and the Romans lit up watch fires from height to height and promontory to promontory along their whole shores of the Mediterranean.
The great terror of the Northern sea kings, and the perilled and trembling life of the dark middle age, put out all those guiding and saving lights. The people cared not to favor the inroad of the sea rover; the sea was an object of dread, almost of hatred. Every ship was an enemy, and, if it ran aground, was deemed lawful as well as unpitied prey. The pillage of a wreck was the gain of the noble; the noble and the wrecker were one! The Count de Leon, made wealthy by the fatal shoal upon his County's shore, said of that murderous rock, that it was "a precious stone, far more precious than any that glitters in a kingly crown."
Even in our own time, innocently, the poor fishermen have, again and again, by those fires which they have kindled upon the beach, seduced our poor seamen into shipwreck and death. The very beacons themselves have, not seldom, played the bad part of the false hearted wrecker, alluring, only to betray; so easy is it to mistake one light for another. Now and then, that mistake, so readily made, leads to very horrible consequences.
It was France, who, at the close of her great wars, took the lead in making the lighthouse the great saviour of the benighted and well nigh wrecked seamen. Provided with that great refracting lamp of Fresnel, (a lantern equal to four thousand common ones, and throwing its ruddy gleam over a dozen, or so, of leagues), it can cast, that good modern beacon, its directing and saving light, hither and thither so that strait and shoal are made visible and safe in the deep midnight as in the full broad glow of the bright noon. To the sailor, who steers by the stars, this invention gave him, as it were, a new heaven and added constellations. Planets, fixed stars, all were created anew for him, and in those newly invented constellations there was even an improvement upon the celestial lights, in the variety of color, intensity and duration, of their glow and of their flashing. To some, we gave the calm, fixed, pale and steady gleaming which sufficed for the tranquil night and the comparatively safe sea; to others, the revolving and flashing, and fierce and ruddy glow that shone to every point of the compass. These latter, like the phosphoric creatures of the deep, palpitate and flash fitfully, now gleaming and anon paling, now leaping into dazzling glow, and anon dying into deepest darkness. In the darkest and most tempestuous nights, they are ever restless as Ocean's self, and seem to give him back motion for motion, and gleam for gleam to the lurid and fitful lightnings.
Let us remember that in 1826, and even as late as 1830, our seas were still terrible in their drear darkness. In all Europe there were but few lighthouses; in Africa, there was but the single one on the Cape, and, in all vast Asia there were only those of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, while the whole vast extent of South America displayed not even one. Since the latter date all nations following, imitating, even rivaling, France, have said, on every bold headland that overlooks every dangerous shoal and strait have said "Let there be light!" and every where the friendly light, gleams tranquilly, or fitfully flashes.
Just here I should like you to make with me the circumnavigation of our seas from Dunkirk to Biarritz, and to take a survey of our lighthouses. But, it would occupy us too long. Calais, with her four lights of different colors, throws out her friendly warnings and hospitable imitations even to distant Dover; and the noble gulf of the Seine, between Heve and Barfleur, lights the American seaman on his otherwise perilous passage to Havre and thence to the very home, the very heart of France.
And the good heart of France goes to her very threshold to welcome the coming and sea borne guest; lighting up, as, with an admirable skill and hospitality she does, every bold point of Brittany. At the outpost of Brest, at Saint Matthew, at Penmark, at the isle of Fen, every headland has its warning and guiding light, now flashing, now darkening, from minute to minute, or from second to second, and saying by sudden flash or momentary gloom, "Seamen! Beware! Luff it is! give that rock a wide berth! Keep off that shoal! Port! Hard aport!—Weather,—it is! Midship helm! So! Steady! Safe you are,—at your moorings!"
And observe, all these watch towers over the perilous deep, often built as they are among the breakers, and as it were in the very bosom of the tempest, solve for art the difficult problem of absolute solidity or seemingly treacherous and unsafe foundation. Many of them are quite enormously high. The architecture of the middle ages, about which so much is as boastfully as untruly said and sung, never ventured to build so high, save on condition of giving their edifices clumsy buttresses and of clamping with clumsy and costly clamps of iron, the peaked summits of their towers. A glance at the much boasted, though really anything but artistic steeple of Strasbourg, will convince you of this. Our modern builders resort to no such rude expedients. The Héaux beacon, recently erected by M. Reynaud on the dangerous shoal of the Épées de Tréguier, displays all the sublime simplicity of some gigantic ocean tree. It has no buttresses, and it needs none; its foundation is sunk boldly and bodily into the living rock; from its base of sixty feet, it rears its tall column of twenty-four feet in diameter, and each of its huge granites is, neatly as firmly, dovetailed into the other, so neatly, so closely, so firmly, that cement is a sheer superfluity; and so solidly is all built that from base to summit the tall tower is solid as, nay, we may almost venture to say, more solid than, the old rock from which science, and art, and perseverance and what the American so graphically calls pluck have hewn each separate stone. Your wild wave knows not where to find a rent in the armor of this tall ocean-espying giant. She may smite, she may rage, but her blows will not harm, her rage will be spent in vain; from that rounded and great mass the giant blow glances harmlessly off; the mightiest thunder strokes of the ever enraged and ever baffled ocean have only succeeded in giving to this grand edifice a far slighter inclination than that of the purposely inclined "leaning tower" of Pisa.
Behold, then, instead of those sad bastions which, in the olden day, overlooked and threatened old ocean, like those with which Spain threatened the Moor, our modern civilization erects peaceful towers of most benevolent and beneficent hospitality; beautiful and noble monuments, often sublime as they appeal to art, always touching as they appeal to sentiment; those towers which, flashing forth their ruddy or gleaming with their silvery fires, make upon the confines of our living, swarming, and much imperilled earth, a new firmament, saving, and guiding, blessing and blessed, as the firmament above us. When no star shines upon us from that firmament above, the seaman hails this art-created light as the star of brotherhood;
"Bids its ruddy lustre hail
And scorns to strike his timorous sail."