If you look southward, and I want you to, note that delicious blue 

 beyond the blue. See how it tilts against the sky like the dear sea! 

 Really, friend, my farm is cheap whatever it cost me, to have the 

 sea on its south horizon. Here I am, geographically stated, fifteen 

 hundred miles from the ocean, and, in all honor, as I look over and over 

 again, I feel looking at the sea as I have seen it from the inlands of the 

 Isle of Mona, as I have seen it from the shores of Maine, back in the 

 r meadows with the pines for background, or in Cali- 

 fornia, where scorched deserts smoked at my back 

 in the furious sun; but this sea we are looking on 

 now has all the ravishment of those, and did I not 

 know (for I am a knowing man, notwithstanding 

 many intimations to the contrary) that the sea was 

 not there, 1 could take oath that there its waters 

 lashed shoreward with multitudinous music and 

 gentle laughter. Often from this hill have - 1 re- 

 freshed my tired spirit by watching this bewilder- 

 ment of sea, and have been fain to believe that a 

 sea breeze went lingering by my cheek. Here I 

 entertain dreams of the sea, and the murmur of 

 soft music comes to me as when in long blessed 

 nights, I have half slumbered and half wakened on 

 a seabeach listening to the hoarse calls from the 

 tremendous deep when it "moans round with many 

 voices." This is my seashore, and these cliffs a/e 

 my sea cliffs, and I could stand and watch this blue, 

 unhindered ocean, all the glad day as in a happy 

 dream. Here I may with Friend Whittier pitch 

 my tent upon the beach, and hear the night wind 

 surging through the tree tops with unquenchable 

 music, and think I hear the music of the sea. 

 And then this sea is not a dream of the sea, but 

 a dreamless sea, and do you wonder I love my farm when it borders on 

 what sweet Blackmore calls "the great unvintaged ocean?" 



Now, friend, look northward, Once I tried to experiment on my 

 Dutchman (mine then, but mine no longer; he has changed pasture, 

 much to the benefit of my pasture) saying, "That is a beautiful view, 

 is n't it?" To which, while he tamped the posts down and spat copious 

 tobacco on my grass, he replied, "Bully." That was praise and I was 



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