The splendid breakers! how they rushed,
All emerald green and flashing white,
Tumultuous in the morning sun,
With cheer, and sparkle, and delight!
And freshly blew the fragrant wind,
The wild sea-wind, across their tops,
And caught the spray and flung it far,
In sweeping showers of glittering drops.
Within the cove all flashed and foamed,
With many a fleeting rainbow hue;
Without, gleamed, bright against the sky,
A tender, wavering line of blue,
Where tossed the distant waves, and far
Shone silver-white a quiet sail,
And overhead the soaring gulls
With graceful pinions stemmed the gale.
And all my pulses thrilled with joy,
Watching the wind's and water's strife,—
With sudden rapture,—and I cried,
"Oh, sweet is Life! Thank God for Life!"
Sailed any cloud across the sky,
Marring this glory of the sun's?
Over the sea, from distant forts,
There came the boom of minute-guns!
War-tidings! Many a brave soul fled,
And many a heart the message stuns!—
I saw no more the joyous waves,
I only heard the minute-guns.
ORIGINALITY.
A great contemporary writer, so I am told, regards originality as much rarer than is commonly supposed. But, on the contrary, is it not far more frequent than is commonly supposed? For one should not identify originality with mere primacy of conception or utterance, as if a thought could be original but once. In truth, it may be so thousands or millions of times; nay, from the beginning to the end of man's times upon the earth, the same thoughts may continue rising from the same fountains in his spirit. Of the central or stem thoughts of consciousness, of the imperial presiding imaginations, this is actually true. Ceaseless re-origination is the method of Nature. This alone keeps history alive. For if every Mohammedan were but a passive appendage to the dead Mohammed, if every disciple were but a copy in plaster of his teacher, and if history were accordingly living and original only in such degree as it is an unprecedented invention, the laws of decay should at once be made welcome to the world.
The fact is otherwise. As new growths upon the oldest cedar or baobab do not merely spin themselves out of the wood already formed,—as they thrive and constitute themselves only by original conversation with sun, earth, and air,—that is, in the same way with any seed or sapling,—so generations of Moslems, Parsees, or Calvinists, while obeying the structural law of their system, yet quaff from the mystical fountains of pure Life the sustenance by which they live. Merely out of itself the tree can give nothing,—literally, nothing. True, if cut down, it may, under favorable circumstances, continue for a time to feed the growing shoots out of its own decay. Yet not even at the cost of decay and speedy exhaustion could the old trunk accomplish this little, but for the draft made upon it by the new growths. It is their life, it is the relationship which they assert with sun and rain and all the elements, which is foremost in bringing about even this result. So it is with the great old literatures, with the old systems of philosophy and faith. They are simply avenues, or structural forms, through which succeeding generations of souls come into conversation with eternal Nature, and express their original life.