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18 THE GBEAT LONE LAND.
lives are spent in ceaseless movement over the world, who
wander from continent to continent, from island to island,
who dwell in many cities but are the citizens of no city, who
sail away and come back again, whose home is the broad
earth itself, to such as these the coming in sight of land is
no unusual occurrence, and yet the man has grown old at
his trade of wandering who can look utterly uninterested
upon the first glimpse of land rising out of the waste of
ocean : small as that glimpse may be, only a rock, a cape, a
mountain crest, it has the power of localizing an idea, the
very vastness of which prevents its realization on shore.
From the deck of an outward-bound vessel one sees rising,
faint and blue, a rocky headland or a mountain summit—one
does not ask if the mountain be of Maine, or of Mexico, or
the Cape be St. Ann's or Hatteras, one only sees America.
Behind that strip of blue coast lies a world, and that world
the new one. Far away inland lie scattered many landscapes
glorious with mountain, lake, river, and forest, all
unseen, all unknown to the wanderer who for the first time
seeks the American shore; yet instinctively their presence
is felt in that faint outline of sea-lapped coast which lifts
itself above the ocean ; and even if in after-time it becomes
the lot of the wanderer, as it became my lot, to look again
upon these mountain summits, these immense inland seas,
tiese mighty rivers whose waters seek their mother ocean
through 3000 miles of meadow, in none of these glorious
parts, vast though they be, will the sense of the still vaster
whole be realized as strongly as in that first glimpse of land
showing dimly over the western horizon of the Atlantic.
The sunset of a very beautiful evening in May was
making bright the shores of Massachusetts as the
" Samaria," under her fullest head of steam, ran up the
entrance to Plymouth Sound. To save daylight into port