Henry Beston

“ In the hull, in the space beneath the wardroom lie the quarters of the crew, amidships lie the boilers and the engine room, and beyond them, a second space for the crew and the petty officers. A destroyer is by no means a paradise of comfort, though when the vessel lies in a quiet port, she can be as attractive and livable as a yacht. But Heaven help the poor sailor aboard a destroyer at sea! The craft rolls, dips, shudders, plunges like a horse straight up at the stars, sinks rapidly and horribly, and even has spells of see-sawing violently from side to side. ”

“ Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach. ”

“ Thread by thread, inch by inch, the grass-palace of Airda grew on the loom, the cave of the talking waters, the giant ship with its masts above the clouds, and the fountain of memory in the wood beyond the world. The sun set behind the high towers of the city, and still Fidella labored at the loom; candles melted low, and still the sound of the weaving hummed upon the air.
In the dark of the second night, as Fidella rose to toss a brand upon the fire, she heard, through the quiet of the room, the distant beat of galloping hoofs and the thundering rumble of a coach. ”

“ The color of these villages in Lorraine is rather lovely, for the walls of the houses, built of the local buff-yellow stone and ferrous sand, are of a warm, brown tone that goes well with the roofs of claret-red tile and the brown landscape. A glorious sky of silvery white cloud masses, pierced with sunlight and islanded with soft blue, shone over the soldier village. There were no combatants in it when we passed through, only the old poilus who drove the wagons to the trenches and the army hostlers who looked after the animals. ”

“ In spite of the enchanter's careful training in manners, the cat and the dog, I am sorry to say, almost stared for an instant at the King. Small wonder that they did so, for the unfortunate young man lay under a horrid spell, and his face and hands were not pink or white or sun-brown, like yours or mine, but bright green, like a parrot's wing!
"Welcome, O wonderful animals," said the enchanted King. "Your fame has gone before you into every land, and it is said that there is no question you cannot answer. ”

“ Returning to the Cape at night from a trip to town, I heard the roar of the ocean in Orleans, and on arriving at Nauset, found the beach flooded to the dunes, and covered with a churn of surf and moonlight. Dragging a heavy suitcase and clad in my go-to-town clothes, I had an evil time getting to the Fo’castle over the dune tops and along the flooded marsh.
Many forces mingle in the surf of a storm—the great earth rhythm of the waves, the violence of wind, the struggle of water to obey its own elemental law. ”

“ There isn't a soul in sight, not a stir of smoke on the horizon. Just as Captain Otto, or Von Something is gloating over the last hospital ship he sunk, and thinking what a lovely afternoon it is, a tin fish comes for him like a bullet out of a gun, there comes a thundering pound, a vibration that sends little waves through the water, a great foul swirl, fragments of cork, and it's all over with the Watch on the Rhine. Sometimes Fritz's torpedo meets ours on the way. Then once in a while a destroyer or a patriotic but misguided tramp makes things interesting for a bit. ”

“ Sometimes the sound is of the lowing of cattle, sometimes of the threshing of grain, sometimes ’tis the creaking of a hay wain in a field. And always the old and wise tell of the Husbandman of the Hills. Some day a mortal will find the hidden Husbandman—do you but wait and see.”
It was the early summer now, and all went merry as a marriage bell. The heavy water-wheel turned with a rolling thunder and a sound of endless splashing; and the four arms of the windmill spun with a windy thrum and a clock-like clack from the rising of the wind to the calm of sundown and the eve. ”

“ When Malefico saw the bird-boy, a look of surprise appeared on his face, for he had believed that the wonderful child was dead. Then he fell to thinking, and as he thought, wicked purposes swept over his cruel face just as the shadows of dark clouds sweep over a gloomy pool.
"If it were known that the winged child is alive," he thought, "the people would thrust me from my place, and restore him to his father's throne. Now that the bird-boy is in my hands, I will destroy him, and be sure of my power." ”

“ AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS I
There is a new sound on the beach, and a greater sound. Slowly, and day by day, the surf grows heavier, and down the long miles of the beach, at the lonely stations, men hear the coming winter in the roar. Mornings and evenings grow cold, the northwest wind grows cold; the last crescent of the month’s moon, discovered by chance in a pale morning sky, stands north of the sun. Autumn ripens faster on the beach than on the marshes and the dunes. Westward and landward there is colour; seaward, bright space and austerity. ”

“ Oh, the vigilance, the energy, the keenness of the American patrol! There were tales of U-boats hiding in suspected bays, of merchantmen swiftly and terribly avenged, of voices that cried for help in the night, of life boats almost awash in whose foul waters the dead floated swollen and horrible. The war of the destroyer against the submarine is a matter of tragic melodrama.
The wandering glow of the swaying lamp now was reflected from the varnished table to one keen young face, now to another. "Running a destroyer is a young man's game," says the Navy. ”

“ Loud and clear rang the cry of Leoline through the mountain air and was followed by a silence.
A breeze shook the branches of the dwarfed pines; a bird sang.
Then, suddenly, a far high murmur trembled to a roar, a roar loud and terrible enough to drown all the sounds of the world, and from the snow-capped ridge above the road there flowed and rolled down on Babylan and his men a mighty avalanche. Huge stones were there in it, glistening ice and snow, brown earth and uprooted pines. Sweeping over the road, the mass poured over the precipice into the valley-depth a league below. ”

“ Immediately every bird let fall a great beach-stone which he held in his claws, and for a long minute, the sky rained stones, round, polished stones that fell like bolts of thunder. When the storm was over, and the cloud had begun to break into rifts and speckles of light and flapping gray wings, the wicked Malefico and his cruel nobles lay buried forever beneath mound upon mound of stones. The doom which Malefico had intended for another had overtaken him.
The King and the Queen, Rosabella and the bird-boy, rushed down the stairs and out into the sunlight. ”

“ For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
The afternoon sun sinks red as fire; the tide climbs the beach, its foam a strange crimson; miles out, a freighter goes north, emerging from the shoals. ”

“ And the golden coach, gleaming great golden gleams in the pools of light, rolled over the hills and far away.
It was twilight now and, in the little house in the wood, Fidella lifted the bridal wreath from her head, lit candles, and sank into a wing chair by the burnt-out embers of the fire. So great was her trust in Alois, that never a questioning doubt of him raised its voice in her heart.
“Some evil thing has surely come to pass,” said faithful Fidella. “Alas! what may it be?” And for two days she walked to and fro between the window and her loom, vainly hoping for a sign. ”

“ At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west, the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and vanishes into day.
At the foot of this cliff a great ocean beach runs north and south unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might be the end or the beginning of a world. Age by age, the sea here gives battle to the land ”

“ And he was about to dismount and pick up the dagger, when Florian spurred on ahead of him, seized the dagger, and tossed it into a ditch.
"Fie, what a naughty page!" cried the lords and ladies.
The company now rode on for a few miles more, and the Prince saw by the roadside a beautiful enchanted garden. Birds of many colors sang in the branches of the trees, fountains sparkled and danced in the sunlight, and the sweetest of music was heard. At the same moment the golden bird sang louder and longer than ever.
"What a beautiful garden!" cried the Prince. "Let us ride in and look about." ”

“ Baffled by the flame, Porphyrio, still guarding Liria, fought his way toward a great stair at the very end of the hall. In the wall there, barred with silver and shuttered with stone, a giant circular window faced the west. And now there rose a tumult through the hall, and sounds of magic and thunder. Nothing daunted, Porphyrio touched the sunbeam to the window-bar, and threw the double shutters open wide. The sun was yet above the wave, sky and water were aflame, and the great tide of sunlight swept into the Palace of the Night like the music of many trumpets. ”

“ The sand bar of Eastham is the sea wall of the inlet. Its crest overhangs the beach, and from the high, wind-trampled rim, a long slope well overgrown with dune grass descends to the meadows on the west. Seen from the tower at Nauset, the land has an air of geographical simplicity; as a matter of fact, it is full of hollows, blind passages, and amphitheatres in which the roaring of the sea changes into the far roar of a cataract. I often wander into these curious pits. On their floors of sand, on their slopes, I find patterns made by the feet of visiting birds. ”

“ The son, a lively lad about twelve years of age, obeyed his mother with joy, and clapping his little green hat on his head, stepped forth into the road. It was a beautiful clear morning in the spring, and the earth, released from the icy chains of winter, was rejoicing in her freedom and the return of the sun. A few birds, just back from the southland, rocked on twigs swollen with bursting buds, a thousand rills flowing from everywhere and in every direction sparkled and sang, and the air was sweet with the odor of ploughed fields.
The boy, whose name was Peter, walked along whistling. ”

“ Presently Kraken caught sight of the floating bell which marked the entrance to the fairway of the Isles.
The sea-bell had been made in the fiery mountain forges of the Kingdom of Iron. Its round base was of iron, and a band of iron, chiseled about with fish and shells and flowers of the sea, encircled its tossing rim. The warning bell rose from the center of the shield, and two iron figures, one of a giant, one of a dwarf, struck it with iron hammers night and day.
And Kraken laughed and sent men to break the hammers from the hands of the iron figures so that the bell should sound no more. ”

“ Ever since I came to live here on Cape Cod, I have been amazed at the number of land-bird migrants I have encountered on the dunes. I expected to see sandpipers on the beach and scoters in the surf, for they are coast-wise folk, but I did not expect to see the red-breasted nuthatch rise out of the September dunes, or find the charming black-and-yellow warbler sitting on the ridgepole of the Fo’castle, his black-tipped tail feathers turned to the Atlantic. But perhaps I had best begin at the beginning and tell how the sparrows and the warblers came down to us this autumn by the coast. ”

“ Now, if the bird-boy was the prettiest little boy in all the world, Rosabella was the prettiest little girl. Moreover, she had a sweet disposition, which is a gift even more precious than the gift of beauty. It was a lovely picture to see the children building toy castles on the floor of the nursery in the castle tower, the sun streaming on the black-brown hair and silver white wings of the little boy, and on the golden curls of Rosabella.
Twelve years passed. The bird-boy grew into a handsome lad; Rosabella into the loveliest of princesses. Twice had the bird-boy saved Rosabella's life. ”

“ The summer ripened and came to an end; the crackled leaves tumbled and fled before a howling wind; snow covered the lonely fields; and still the little minstrel roamed the world, seeking the wonderful tune.
Now it fortuned that, as the little minstrel turned his steps to the west, he arrived in the city of a king whose court musician was said to know all the tunes in the world. Travel-worn, brown of face, and humbly clad as he was, the youth made his way through the palace and, cap in hand, knocked gently at the great musician’s door. ”

“ As I walk the beach on a bright and blustery January morning, my first impression is one of space, beauty, and loneliness. The summer bird life of the beach has completely disappeared, and at the moment of which I tell, not a single beach bird or sea bird, not even a resident gull, is to be seen on the beach along all these empty miles. I walk, and no terns come swooping down at me out of the dunes, scolding me for my intrusion on their immense and ancient privacy; no sandpipers rise at my approach, wheel over the inner breakers, and settle down again a hundred yards ahead. ”

“ Just outside each hole, the fine sand is all delicately ascrawl with the small, endless comings and goings. The whole upper beach, indeed, has become a plain of intense and minute life; there are tunnels and doors and pitways everywhere. The dune locusts that were so small in June have grown large and learned to make a sound. All up and down the dunes, sometimes swept seaward out of their course by the west wind, go various butterflies. When I turn up driftwood in the dunes, or walk the wheel ruts in the meadows, crickets race off into the grass. ”

“ Night is very beautiful on this great beach. It is the true other half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfilment, it is rest. Thin clouds float in these heavens, islands of obscurity in a splendour of space and stars: the Milky Way bridges earth and ocean; the beach resolves itself into a unity of form, its summer lagoons, its slopes and uplands merging; against the western sky and the falling bow of sun rise the silent and superb undulations of the dunes. ”

“ THE BEACH I
East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold. ”

“ The beach at night has a voice all its own, a sound in fullest harmony with its spirit and mood—with its little, dry noise of sand forever moving, with its solemn, overspilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like lamps from the high heavens—and that sound the piping of a bird. As I walk the beach in early summer my solitary coming disturbs it on its nest, and it flies away, troubled, invisible, piping its sweet, plaintive cry. The bird I write of is the piping plover, Charadrius melodus, sometimes called the beach plover or the mourning bird. ”

“ It is loudest when the tide is low and breakers are rolling beach stones up and down a slope of the lower beach.
I am, perhaps, most conscious of the sound of surf just after I have gone to bed. Even here I read myself to drowsiness, and, reading, I hear the cadenced trampling roar filling all the dark. So close is the Fo’castle to the ocean’s edge that the rhythm of sound I hear oftenest in fair weather is not so much a general tumult as an endless arrival, overspill, and dissolution of separate great seas. ”

“ The snow skirted along the beach, the wind suffering it no rest; I saw little whirlpools of it driving down the sand into the onrush of the breakers, it gathered in the footprints of the coast guard patrols, building up on their leeward side and patterning them in white on the empty beach. The very snow in the air had a character of its own, for it was the snow of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic, snow icy and crystalline, and sweeping across the dunes and moors rather than down upon them. ”

“ Out of the wild, crumbling confusion born of the dissolution of the force and the last great shape, foamy fountains spurt, and ringlets of spray. The mass of water, still all furiously a-churn and seething white, now rushes for the rim of the beach as it might for an inconceivable cataract. Within thirty-five feet the water shoals from two feet to dry land. The edge of the rush thins, and the last impulse disappears in inch-deep slides of foam which reflect the sky in one last moment of energy and beauty and then vanish all at once into the sands. ”

“ The plant flourishes in the most exposed situations, it jumps from the dune rim to the naked slopes, it even tries to find a permanent station on the beach. Silvery gray-green all summer long, in autumn it puts on gold and russet-golden colourings of singular delicacy and beauty.
The grass grows thickest on the slopes and shoulders of the mounds, its tall leaves inclosing intrusive heads and clumps of the thick-fleshed dune goldenrod. Still lower down the slope, where the sands open and the spears rise thin, the beach pea catches the eye with its familiar leaf and faded topmost bloom ”

“ On such southeasterly nights, the fog lay thick on marsh and ocean, the distant lights of Eastham vanished in a universal dark, and on the invisible beach below the dune, great breakers born of fog swell and the wind rolled up the sands with the slow, mournful pace of stately victims destined to immolation, and toppled over, each one, in a heavy, awesome roar that faded to silence before a fellow victim followed on out of the darkness on the sea. ”

“ At the ocean’s very edge the air is almost always cool—cold even—and delicately moist with surf spray and the endless dissolution of the innumerable bubbles of the foam slides; the wet sand slope beneath exhales a cool savour of mingling beach and sea, and the innermost breakers push ahead of them puffs of this fragrant air. It is a singular experience to walk this brim of ocean when the wind is blowing almost directly down the beach, but now veering a point toward the dunes, now a point toward the sea. ”

“ The long miles of beach are never more beautiful than when waves are rolling in fighting a strong breeze. Then do the breakers actually seem to charge the coast. As they approach, the wind meets them in a shock of war, the chargers rear but go on, and the wind blows back their manes. North and south, I watch them coursing in, the manes of white, sun brilliant spray streaming behind them for thirty and even forty feet. Sea horses do men call such waves on every coast of the world. ”

“ If you would see waves at their best, come on such a day, when the ocean reflects a lovely sky, and the wind is light and onshore; plan to arrive in the afternoon so that you will have the sun facing the breakers. Come early, for the glints on the waves are most beautiful and interesting when the light is oblique and high. And come with a rising tide.
The surf is high, and on the far side of it, a wave greater than its fellows is shouldering out of the blue, glinting immensity of sea. ”

“ Grasses in the salt meadows are fruiting; there are brownish and greenish-yellow patches on the levels of summer green. On the dunes, the sand lies quiescent in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it lies as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a week or more, and the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the sand in my path down Fo’castle dune becomes so dry, so loose and deep, that I trudge through it as through snow. ”

“ Shortly after midnight, Bill came to the door, but I did not get up and dress to go down the beach with him, for I was rather tired from piling up a mass of driftwood, so I sat up in bed and talked to him by the dying light of my fire. On bitter nights, I used to put a big log on in the hope that it might flicker and smoulder till morning, but on average nights, I let the fire die down to a bed of ashes, for I am a light sleeper, and the little play of flames on the hearth kept me awake. Living in outer nature keeps the senses keen, and living alone stirs in them a certain watchfulness. ”

“ The rhythm of waves beats in the sea like a (48) pulse in living flesh. It is pure force, forever embodying itself in a succession of watery shapes which vanish on its passing.
I stand on my dune top watching a great wave coursing in from sea, and know that I am watching an illusion, that the distant water has not left its place in ocean to advance upon me, but only a force shaped in water, a bodiless pulse beat, a vibration.
Consider the marvel of what we see. Somewhere in ocean, perhaps a thousand miles and more from this beach, the pulse beat of earth liberates a vibration, an ocean wave. ”

“ Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life—all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain. As I write I think of my beloved birds of the great beach, and of their beauty and their zest of living. And if there are fears, know also that Nature has its unexpected and unappreciated mercies. ”

“ An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean lingers on the edge of winter. Day after day the April sun pours an increasing splendour on the ocean plain, a hard, bright splendour of light, but the Atlantic mirror drinks no warmth. A chance cloud upon the sun, a shadow, and the sea of an instant returns to February. No shadow of cloud may do the same upon the dunes. Under this April light the mound and landward slopes of the great wall have put on a strange and lovely colour which lies upon them with the delicacy of a reflection in a pool. ”

“ All afternoon long the surf had thundered high upon (85) the beach, the ebb tide backed up against the wind. With the turn of the tide came fury unbelievable. The great rhythm of its waters now at one with the rhythm of the wind, the ocean rose out of the night to attack the ancient rivalry of earth, hurling breaker after thundering breaker against the long bulwark of the sands. The Fo’castle, being low and strongly built, stood solid as a rock, but its walls thrummed in the gale. ”