Part 7 (1/2)

”And my simple question is, how comes about this expressiveness? Why, simply there is a person who is projecting himself through this embodiment and it is the revelation of him, just as our friends' ways express the person of the friend behind them.”

How grand are those words! And how helpful to men who desire the very co-operation of the seas in fulfilling their plans in unifying the races! For if Prof. Blaisdell was thus inspired with the thought of the co-operation of the waters of Lake Michigan with the historic purposes of man, what should the true freeman feel as he looks out over the Pacific? I can only tell you what I have felt in the words on the following page:

THE ALTRUISM OF THE SEA

Free from the intrusion of littleness, Standing on the sh.o.r.es of our great Western Sea, My groping thoughts, O sea, Now grapple with thy tempestuous waves.

My ecstatic soul argues with thy gales for an interpretation of the message flowing clean and strong from the ”million-acred meadows” of the out-lying seas.

My straining ear listens to the clamorous, reiterating almost uninvokable voice of thy tides.

For able to speak to man, like brooks and flowers, I am inquiring, what you are about, the knowledge of your place in the amelioration of the world?

And lo, now nature's cord is struck, The secret word is caught, And this is what I hear As again I plead, ”thou are not a purposeless, lifeless plangent deep.

O great sea, who's purpose doest thou fulfill?

What are thou almightily about, what doing?”

”Doing!” seems to murmur its sustained voice with its rhythmic storming of my soul, ”Doing! I am doing what man is doing, what the nations are evolving, what the eternal, creative spirit living within me is urging, I am resolutely moving--crest, wave, tide and ponderous deep in sympathy with world harmony, toward democracy.

Moving from ponderous deep, tide, wave and crest toward distant lands.

Eager--so providenced--to carry to all pagan sh.o.r.es, The s.h.i.+ps, the statesmen and the life giving trade winds of democracy.”

”It is true, astonis.h.i.+ngly,” I said, ”Yes now I sense it and I feel it.

And what an unconquerable will, what a purpose!

The very sh.o.r.es, they tremble with its resolution, For with man even the seas are sympathically for freemen at work!”

And then looking outward and skyward, the G.o.d of our sea going fathers, the spirit of the very G.o.d of Hosts, awoke this stronger message to my thought: ”Fear not, O sons of Pilgrims For the waters engulfed not Columbus' freemen when they sailed a sh.o.r.eless sea, Nor was the Mayflower immeshed in the black jaws of an angry deep.

And yours are s.h.i.+ps of fate!

He who omnipotently palms the oceans pilots them.

To let them pa.s.s--O s.h.i.+ps--to bear them safely on, The tides, the storms and the winds are stayed.

”Move on, move on befriended by an illimitable peace.

Move on, move on to every slave desecrated sh.o.r.e!

Move on, the harmless, but forward momentum of these tides will take you on and on.

For the Creator worketh hitherto and they must work.

For He hath given ”to the sea His decree.”