In dreams the
children of the sea hear its voice.
I have read in some book of travels that certain tribes of Arabs have
no name for the ocean, and that when they came to the shore for the
first time, they asked with eager sadness, as if penetrated by the
conviction of a superior beauty, "what is that desert of water more
beautiful than the land?" And in the translations of German stories
which Adoniram and the other children read, and into which I
occasionally look in the evening when they are gone to bed--for I like
to know what interests my children--I find that the Germans, who do
not live near the sea, love the fairy lore of water, and tell the
sweet stories of Undine and Melusina, as if they had especial charm
for them, because their country is inland.
We who know the sea have less fairy feeling about it, but our
realities are romance. My earliest remembrances are of a long range of
old, half dilapidated stores; red brick stores with steep wooden
roofs, and stone window-frames and door-frames, which stood upon docks
built as if for immense trade with all quarters of the globe.
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