Transcendentalism. Transcend this home-land business, exalt the idea of These States till you have made it a universal idea, says the true American. The oversoul is a world-soul, not a local thing. So, in the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to the sea. Not to the land. Earth is too specific, too particular. Besides, the blood of white men is wine of no American soil. No, no. But the blood of all men is ocean-born. We have our material universality, our blood-oneness, in the sea. The salt water. You can't idealize the soil. But you've got to try. And trying, you reap a great imaginative reward. And the greatest reward is failure. To know you have failed, that you _must_ fail. That is the greatest comfort of all, at last. Tolstoi failed with the soil: Thomas Hardy too: and Giovanni Verga; the three greatest. The further extreme, the greatest mother, is the sea. Love the great mother of the sea, the Magna Mater. And see how bitter it is. And see how you must fail to win her to your ideal: forever fail. Absolutely fail. Swinburne tried in England. But the Americans made the greatest trial. The most vivid failure. At a certain point, human life becomes uninteresting to men. What then? They turn to some universal. The greatest material mother of us all is the sea. Dana's eyes failed him when he was studying at Harvard. And suddenly, he turned to the sea, the naked Mother. He went to sea as a common sailor before the mast. You can't idealize brute labour. Yet you can. You can go through with brute labour, and _know_ what it means. You can even meet and match the sea, and KNOW her. This is what Dana wanted: a naked fighting experience with the sea. KNOW THYSELF. That means, know the earth that is in your blood. Know the sea that is in your blood. The great elementals. But we must repeat: KNOWING and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states. The more you know, exactly, the less you _are._ The more you _are_, in being, the less you know. This is the great cross of man, his dualism. The blood-self, and the nerve-brain self. Knowing, then, is the slow death of being. Man has his epochs of being, his epochs of knowing. It will always be a great oscillation. The goal is to know how not-to-know. Dana took another great step in knowing: knowing the mother sea. But it was a step also in his own undoing. It was a new phase of dissolution of his own being. Afterwards, he would be a less human thing. He would be a knower: but more near to mechanism than before. That is our cross, our doom. And so he writes, in his first days at sea, in winter, on the Atlantic: "Nothing can compare with the _early breaking of day_ upon the wide, sad ocean. There is something in the first grey streaks stretching along the Eastern horizon, and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which creates a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give."