The first three paragraphs of The Spirit of Adventure are purely personal in nature and therefore wholly in keeping with the spirit of the essay form. Furthermore, those paragraphs—so reminiscent of the fancy of the writer's famous grandfather, Nathaniel Hawthorne,—represent poetic prose. Throughout the article the personal note mingles with the directing voice of the editorial article. Indeed, it would be easy to drop from The Spirit of Adventure everything that is not personal, and thereby to leave pure essay.
As it stands, The Spirit of Adventure is a didactic essay, brave and strong in its thought, and poetic in its style.
Wind has always seemed wonderful and beautiful to me.
Invisible as it is, it pervades the whole world. It has the very quality of life. Without wind, how dead and still the world would be! In the autumn, wind shakes the leaves free and sends them flying, gold and red. It takes the seeds of many plants and sows them over the land. It blows away mists and sets clouds to voyaging, brings rain and fair weather the year round, builds up snow in fantastic palaces, rolls the waves high, murmurs a fairy music in the pines and shouts aloud in storms. Wind is the great adventurer of nature. Sometimes it is so fierce and terrible that nothing can stand before it—houses are torn to shreds, trees are felled, ruin follows where it goes. At other times, it comes marching wet and salt from the sea, or dry and keen from the mountains on hot summer days, bringing ease and rest and health. Keen as a knife, it whips over the frozen ground in winter and screams wildly round the farm-house, taps the panes with ghost fingers, and whistles like a sprite in the chimney. It brings sails from land to land, turns windmills in quaint foreign places, and sets the flags of all the countries of the world fluttering on their high staffs.
Wind is nature's spirit of adventure, keeping her world vigorous, clean, and alive.
For us, too, the spirit of adventure is the fine wind of life, and if we have it not, or lose it, either as individual or nation, then we begin to die, our force and freshness depart, we stop in our tracks, and joy vanishes. For joy is a thing of movement and energy, of striving forward, a thing of hope as well as fruition. You must be thoroughly alive to be truly joyful, and all the great things accomplished by men and nations have been accomplished by vigorous and active souls, not content to sit still and hold the past, but eager to press on and to try undiscovered futures.
If ever a nation was founded on, and built up by, the spirit of adventure, that nation is our own. The very finding of it was the result of a splendid upspring of that spirit. From then on through centuries it was only men in whom the spirit of adventure was strong as life itself who reached our shores. Great adventurers, on they came, borne as they should be, by wind itself! Gallant figures, grim figures, moved by all sorts of lures and impulses, yet one and all stirred and led by the call of adventure, that cares nothing for ease of body or safety, for old, tried rules and set ways and trodden paths, but passionately for freedom and effort, for what is strange and dangerous and thrilling, for tasks that call on brain and body for quick, new decisions and acts.
The spirit of adventure did not die with the settling of our shores. Following the sea adventures came those of the land, the pioneers, who went forward undismayed by the perils and obstacles that appeared quite as insurmountable as did the uncharted seas to Columbus's men. Think of the days, when next you ride across our great continent in the comfort of a Pullman, when it took five months and more to make the same journey with ox-teams. Think how day followed day for those travelers across the Great Plains in a sort of changeless spell, where they topped long slow rise after long slow rise only to see the seemingly endless panorama stretch on before them. Think how they passed the ghastly signs of murdered convoys gone before, and yet pressed on. Think how they settled here and there in new strange places where never the foot of men like themselves had been set before, and proceeded to build homes and till the land, rifle in hand; think how their wives reared their children and kept their homes where never a white child or a Christian home had been before.
Where should we be to-day but for such men and women—if this wind of the spirit had never blown through men's hearts and fired them on to follow its call, as the wind blows a flame?
Wherever you look here in America you can see the signs and traces of this wonderful spirit. In old towns, like Provincetown or Gloucester,[59] you still hear tales of the whale-fisheries, and still see boats fare out to catch cod and mackerel on the wild and dangerous Banks. But in the past, the fishers sailed away for a year or two, round the globe itself, after their game! You see the spirit's tracks along the barren banks of the Sacramento,[60] where the gold-seekers fronted the wilderness after treasure, and in Alaska it walks incarnate. It is hewing its way in forests and digging it in mines; it is building bridges and plants in the deserts and the mountains. Out it goes to the islands of the Pacific, and in Africa it finds a land after its heart.