PRELUDE.
AS one wanders along this southwestern
promontory of the Isle of Peace, and
looks down upon the green translucent water
which forever bathes the marble slopes of the
Pirates' Cave, it is natural to think of the ten
wrecks with which the past winter has strewn
this shore. Though almost all trace of their
presence is already gone, yet their mere memory
lends to these cliffs a human interest. Where
a stranded vessel lies, thither all steps converge,
so long as one plank remains upon another.
There centres the emotion. All else
is but the setting, and the eye sweeps with indifference
the line of unpeopled rocks. They
are barren, till the imagination has tenanted
them with possibilities of danger and dismay.
The ocean provides the scenery and properties
of a perpetual tragedy, but the interest arrives
with the performers. Till then the shores remain
vacant, like the great conventional arm-chairs
of the French drama, that wait for
Rachel to come and die.
Yet as I ride along this fashionable avenue
in August, and watch the procession of the
young and fair, — as I look at stately houses,
from each of which has gone forth almost within
my memory a funeral or a bride, — then
every thoroughfare of human life becomes in
fancy but an ocean shore, with its ripples and
its wrecks. One learns, in growing older, that
no fiction can be so strange nor appear so improbable
as would the simple truth; and that
doubtless even Shakespeare did but timidly
transcribe a few of the deeds and passions he
had personally known. For no man of middle
age can dare trust himself to portray life in its
full intensity, as he has studied or shared it;
he must resolutely set aside as indescribable the
things most worth describing, and must expect
to be charged with exaggeration, even when
he tells the rest.
