And the next moment
I thought how I had been reviling in my fancy God's servant, the sea. To
how many vessels had she not opened a bounteous highway through the waters,
with labour, and food, and help, and ministration, glad breezes and
swelling sails, healthful struggle, cleansing fear and sorrow, yea, and
friendly death! Because she had been commissioned to carry this one or that
one, this hundred or that thousand of his own creatures from one world to
another, was I to revile the servant of a grand and gracious Master? It was
blameless in Connie to feel the late trouble so deeply that she could not
be glad: she had not had the experience of life, yea, of God, that I had
had; she must be helped from without. But for me, it was shameful that I,
who knew the heart of my Master, to whom at least he had so often shown his
truth, should ever be doleful and oppressed. Yet even me he had now helped
from within. The glory of existence as the child of the Infinite had
again dawned upon me. The first hour of the evening of my life had indeed
arrived; the shadows had begun to grow long--so long that I had begun to
mark their length; this last little portion of my history had vanished,
leaving its few gray ashes behind in the crucible of my life; and the final
evening must come, when all my life would lie behind me, and all the memory
of it return, with its mornings of gold and red, with its evenings of
purple and green; with its dashes of storm, and its foggy glooms; with its
white-winged aspirations, its dull-red passions, its creeping envies in
brown and black and earthy yellow.
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