All we human beings dip our
drinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the sea
and catch drops trickling from the springs of creation.
"It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, that
my story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from human
nature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I have
wrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the house
on this Night of the Nativity."
He made the scholar's pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easy
narrative. It had already become evident that this method of telling
the story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amid
Alpine snows.
He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life of
the human race is the sea. It is true that man in some ancestral form
was rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as the
islanded Greeks said of near Venus. Traces of this origin he still
bears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up his
first set of memories--Sea Memories.
He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a single
picturesque phrase:
"Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which the
hues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still are
sounding.
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