Mirror of the Sea

Less perhaps than any other book written by me, or anybody else, does
this volume require a Preface. Yet since all the others including even
the "Personal Record", which is but a fragment of biography, are to have
their Author's Notes, I cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a
false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. I can
see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task.
Necessity--the mother of invention--being even unthinkable in this case,
I do not know what to invent in the way of discourse; and necessity
being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion I don't even know
how to begin to exert myself. Here too the natural inclination comes in.
I have been all my life averse from exertion.

Under these discouraging circumstances I am, however, bound to proceed
from a sense of duty. This Note is a thing promised. In less than a
minute's time by a few incautious words I entered into a bond which has
lain on my heart heavily ever since.

For, this book is a very intimate revelation; and what that is revealing
can a few more pages add to some three hundred others of most sincere
disclosures? I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a
last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which
beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send
to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of
disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a
strenuous life; went on full of love's delight and love's anguish,
facing them in open-eyed exultation, without bitterness and without
repining, from the first hour to the last.

Subjugated but never unmanned I surrendered my being to that passion
which various and great like life itself had also its periods of
wonderful serenity which even a fickle mistress can give sometimes on
her soothed breast, full of wiles, full of fury, and yet capable of an
enchanting sweetness. And if anybody suggest that this must be the lyric
illusion of an old, romantic heart, I can answer that for twenty years I
had lived like a hermit with my passion! Beyond the line of the sea
horizon the world for me did not exist as assuredly as it does not exist
for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. I am
speaking now of that innermost life, containing the best and the worst
that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a
man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding
converse with his kind.

This perhaps is enough for me to say on this particular occasion about
these, my parting words, about this, my last mood in my great passion
for the sea. I call it great because it was great to