I love to think of those Norwegian men who set out eagerly before the
north-east wind when it came down from their mountains in the month of
March like a god of great stature to impel them to the West. They pushed
their Long Keels out upon the rollers, grinding the shingle of the beach
at the fjord-head. They ran down the calm narrows, they breasted and
they met the open sea. Then for days and days they drove under this
master of theirs and high friend, having the wind for a sort of captain,
and looking always out to the sea line to find what they could find. It
was the springtime; and men feel the spring upon the sea even more
surely than they feel it upon the land. They were men whose eyes, pale
with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable good sight
which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change and that
comes after the long emptiness of sea days like a vision after the
sameness of our common lives. To them the land they so discovered was
wholly new.

We have no cause to regret the youth of the world, if indeed the world
were ever young. When we imagine in our cities that the wind no longer
calls us to such things, it is only our reading that blinds us, and the
picture of satiety which our reading breeds is wholly false. Any man
to-day may go out and take his pleasure with the wind upon the high
seas. He also will make his landfalls to-day, or in a thousand years;
and the sight is always the same, and the appetite for such discoveries
is wholly satisfied even though he be only sailing, as I have sailed,
over seas that he has known from childhood, and come upon an island far
away, mapped and well known, and visited for the hundredth time.