The Sea, so ill treated by man, in this pitiless warfare, has been to him most generously kind. When Earth, which he loves so much, when that rude Earth wears, weakens, exhausts him, it is that so much feared, so much abused Sea, which takes him to her bosom, and restores him to new life.
And, in fact, is it not from her that life primitively sprang? She contains within her all the elements of life in a quite marvellous plenitude. Why, then, when we feel ourselves sinking, do we not repair for restoration to the abounding source of life?
That source has space and kindness enough for all, but is especially kind to the too civilized children of men, for the sons and daughters who are suffering for the fathers and mothers, victims of mistaken or sinning Love, less culpable than the sinning parents, yet a thousand fold more punished. The Sea, that vast female, delights to restore them; to their weakness she gives her strength; and restores them young, beautiful, healthful, from the boundless stores of her wide expanse and fathomless depths. Venus, who was born of Ocean, is from Ocean reborn every moment, and not a sick, suffering, peevish, pale, and melancholy Venus, but the triumphant, Venus full of passion and certain of fecundity.
How between this great and salutary, but somewhat rude, strength and our weakness, can there be any connection? What union can there be between elements so greatly disproportioned? That was a serious and difficult question; to solve it required an art, an initiation. To understand that question thoroughly, we must make ourselves acquainted with the time and occasion when this art first revealed itself. Between two ages of strength, the strength of the age of the Renaissance and that of the Revolution, there was a period of depression both moral and physical. The old world had died, the new one was not yet born, and the misbegotten children of worn out parents were weak and unhealthy. On the one hand, the excessive indulgence of the rich; on the other hand, the awful privations of the poor, decimated the nations, and most decimated, precisely those nations which most boasted their civilization. France thrice ruined, from base to apex, in a single century succumbed beneath the orgies of the Regency. England triumphed over our ruin, yet had death and destruction within her own bosom. Her Puritan idea had departed, and another had not yet come. Weakened by the fierce lusts of Charles II., she was still farther degraded by the paltry briberies of Walpole; and in the debasement of the Public the worst passions of the Individual came to light. The fine book of Robinson exhibits the horrors of the terrible Lust of Strong Drink;—a terrible book, that, in which Medicine calls to its aid all the denunciations of Religion, and denounces the gloomy suicide of celibatism.
Anxieties, evil habits, effeminate and unwholesome life;—all these betray themselves in the softened tissues, the meagre forms, the horrid scrofula. Lovely complexions cover the most vile diseases. Anne of Austria, renowned for her extreme clearness of complexion, died of loathsome ulcer; the Princess of Soubise, that dazzlingly fair beauty, rotted, so to speak, into her grave. In England, the Duke of Newcastle asked the learned Doctor Russell why it was that the beautiful Lily and Rose concealed so much of scrofula.
It rarely happens that a worn out race recovers itself; but the English did so. For some seventy or eighty years it recovered a wonderful strength of activity. Partly it owed its recovery to its political and social disturbances,—for there is nothing so conducive to health as movement; but it must be confessed that the chief cause of its renovation was its change of habits. It changed in everything,—education, food, medicine; all were changed, for all felt that health and strength were necessary to success in anything and everything.
There needed no great genius for such a Reform; the true theory had been propounded; all that was necessary was to make the Science an Art, to practise what hitherto had only been preached. The Moravian, Comenius, writing a century before Rousseau, said: "Return to Nature; educate according to Nature;" the Saxon Hoffman said: "Return to Nature; make her your Physician." Hoffman appeared just in time to combat the evils caused by the orgies of the Regency, evils in which the remedies were as bad as the disease, the Physician as fatal as the Quack. Hoffman truly said to his age—"Leave Doctors alone; live temperately, drink water, and you will need no medicines." That was a true moral reform. And thus among ourselves, Priessnith in 1830, after the Bacchanalia of the Restoration imposed upon the luxurious aristocracy of Europe the coarse food of the peasant, and, in the hard northern climate, the open air bath, in snow water; that Hell of cold which, in its reaction, gives such a glow of heat. And the rich and the delicate submitted to this hard discipline; so great is our human love of life and fear of death.
And, in fact, why should not water be the safety of man? Berzelius assures us that four-fifths of our living frames are water; just as four-fifths of our globe are covered by Oceans, Seas, Lakes, and Rivers. For our arid Earth the Sea is a constant Hydropathist, curing it of its otherwise deadly dryness, and nourishing and beautifying its fruits and flowers. Strange and prodigious magician, that same water! With so little, making so much; with so little, destroying so much—destroying so slowly, but so surely!
Gutta lapidem cavat, non vi, sed stepe cadendo;
"The plastic globule wears the rugged rock,
By frequent falling, not by sudden shock."
Water is at once the most potent and the most elastic of all forces, lending her aid to all the metamorphoses of our globe, covering, penetrating, transforming all around us.