under his new necessities; thus men sometimes talk foolishly of horses
being no longer ridden, houses no longer built of wholesome wood and
stone, but of metal; meat no more roasted, but only baked; and even of
stomachs grown too weak for wine. There is a fashion of saying these
things, and much other nastiness. Such talk is (thank God!) mere folly;
for man will always at last tend to his end, which is happiness, and he
will remember again to do all those things which serve that end. So it
is with the uses of the wind, and especially the, using of the wind with
sails.

No man has known the wind by any of its names who has not sailed his own
boat and felt life in the tiller. Then it is that a man has most to do
with the wind, plays with it, coaxes or refuses it, is wary of it all
along; yields when he must yield, but comes up and pits himself again
against its violence; trains it, harnesses it, calls it if it fails him,
denounces it if it will try to be too strong, and in every manner
conceivable handles this glorious playmate.

As for those who say that men did but use the wind as an instrument for
crossing the sea, and that sails were mere machines to them, either they
have never sailed or they were quite unworthy of sailing. It is not an
accident that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so
arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into
their creation, and they expressed him very well; his cunning, and his
mastery, and his adventurous heart. For the wind is in nothing more
capitally our friend than in this, that it has been, since men were men,
their ally in the seeking of the unknown and in their divine thirst for
travel which, in its several aspects--pilgrimage, conquest, discovery,
and, in general, enlargement--is one prime way whereby man fills himself
with being.