I hear it pound in the dark: The salt mist creeps to my brain As I lean from my window and hark To the voice that keeps shouting for me In vain—and yet, not in vain, For I shall go back to the sea.
I long for the leap of the spray— I lust for the swirl of the brine— Though lingering day after day (Land fetters still cumbering me) Some morn I shall claim what is mine— I will rise—I will go to the sea.
It may be a year, or a day— It may be to-morrow—God knows! When, to answer, I’ll up and away, But when and wherever it be, This birthright is bound to foreclose— I must go back to the sea!
“Well, yes,” commented Gale, as I sat down. “I seem to gather what you were driving at then, but it didn’t seem to me you meant quite the same thing the day we sailed.”
Edith Gale came out of a reverie to join in the laugh. I wondered if she knew what I had meant by my floundering about before beginning the verses—if she realized that a word, or perhaps three words, from her would mean more to me now than all the seas and lands of earth.
But Ferratoni, at a signal from Gale, had arisen. For days he had been as one in a dream. We had thought him depressed by the oncoming night. It seems doubtful, now, that he even realized that there was a night.
“Force!” he began. “In that word lies the secret of all the worlds and skies.
“Force, and its visible symbol, vibration!
“Heat, light, color, Electricity—they are vibrations:—many recognize it.
“Life, thought, soul—these, too, are vibrations, yet more subtle:—I have proved it.
“Music—the fitting together or chording of sounds—the union of vibrations—it is the form all know, it has soothed and charmed so many.”
“Beauty,” he continued, “that which _you_ so well offer to men as spirit sustenance, what is it but the combining of life and color vibrations into chords which bring joy to those whose souls awake to answer?
“Harmony—it is Nature’s law. Only the hand of man may work discord. Left undisturbed for even a brief period, the wood and the stream, the meadow and the hill, fall into rhyme and melody, while from the sun and moon falls a quivering glory of light, and voices of the air come whispering or shouting past to blend more perfectly the elemental chord.”