little while to get your tackle in order. Then the line begins to run
off rapidly, and your eager soul cries out, "Ah! what depth! What
perpetual calmness must be down below! What rest is here for all my
tumult! What a grand, vast nature is this!" Surely, surely, you are on
the high seas. Surely, you will not float serenely down the eternities!
But by and by there is a kink. You find that, though the line runs off
so fast, it does not go down,--it only floats out. A current has caught
it and bears it on horizontally. It does not sink plumb. You have been
deceived. Your grand Pacific Ocean is nothing but a shallow little
brook, that you can ford all the year round, if it does not utterly dry
up in the summer heats, when you want it most; or, at best, it is a
fussy little tormenting river, that won't and can't sail a sloop. What
are you going to do about it? You are going to wind up your lead and
line, shoulder your birch canoe, as the old sea-kings used, and thrid
the deep forests, and scale the purple hills, till you come to water
again, when you will unroll your lead and line for another essay. Is
that fickleness? What else can you do? Must you launch your bark on the
unquiet stream, against whose pebbly bottom the keel continually grates
and rasps your nerves--simply that your reputation suffer no detriment?
Fickleness? There is no fickleness about it. You were trying an
experiment which you had every right to try. As soon as you were
satisfied, you stopped. If you had stopped sooner, you would have been
unsatisfied. If you had stopped later, you would have been dissatisfied.
It is a criminal contempt of the magnificent possibilities of life not
to lay hold of "God's occasions floating by." It is an equally criminal
perversion of them to cling tenaciously to what was only the
_simulacrum_ of an occasion. A man will toil many days and nights among
the mountains to find an ingot of gold, which, found, he bears home with
infinite pains and just rejoicing; but he would be a fool who should
lade his mules with iron-pyrites to justify his labors, however severe.