The sea is humanized and redeemed somewhat by the presence of these workers. It is agreeable to reflect that while it nourishes them, they in turn do not mar it. Man communicates the character of his mind and aims to the landscape; enriches it by his labor on the farm, and disfigures it again in a thousand ways, till it is as barren and sordid as his own thoughts. But upon the deep he makes no impression. It is virgin ever. It overpowers him by its stern music--lifts him for a time a little above the sordid and commonplace. The sailor ashore is not the same man he is out there. He must needs have courage, for he must meet the sea. Portuguese, Swedes, Finns--poor stuff for poems in their sailor boarding-houses ashore. But hear how they face the winter gales. Learn the actual experience which makes up that life. The sea invests the poorest, meanest man with heroic qualities. That is his stage; there he looms large. Oil-skins and sou'wester are but his make-up.
I take home a piece of driftwood, for no ordinary fire, but to kindle the imagination, for it is saturated with memories and carries with it the enchantment of the sea. To light this is to set in motion a sort of magic-play. True _driftwood_ has been seasoned by the waters and mellowed by the years. Not any piece of a lobster-pot, or pleasure yacht, or, for that matter, of any modern craft at all is driftwood. It must have come from the timber of a vessel built in the olden time when copper bolts were used, so that the wood is impregnated with copper salts. That is merely the chemistry of it. The wood is saturated with sunshine and moonlight as well, with the storms and calms of the sea--its passions, its subtle moods; more than this, it absorbed of the human life whose destiny was involved with the vessel--the tragedy, the woe. It had two lives--a forest life and a sea life. By force of tragedy alone it became driftwood. Winter and summer the sea sang its brave songs over the boat and chanted her requiem at last as she lay on the ledge. This fragment drifted ashore out of the wreck of a vessel, out of the wreck of great hopes, out of the passion of the sea.
Driftwood, then, is to be lighted in a spirit of reverence. No ordinary blaze, rather is it an altar fire to Poseidon, to whom were immolated the victims; to Aphrodite born of the waves. Rather is it the funeral pyre of a sea-bird, now to rise again from its ashes. It is not to warm the hands, this magic sea-fire, which has borrowed the emerald and sapphire and azure of the waters and reflects still the phosphorescent gleam which lay in the wake of the vessel, but to kindle some feeling and to nurture vague dreams. To set match to this pyre is to invoke the spirit of the deep, to hear the crooning of some distant surf, the hissing of the fretful spray; to conjure up again the wondrous opaline sea.