His wandering days are over--no more quest. The houses rise to his eyes like one long, bleak, uncrested wave from the Arctic Sea.... He means old days, but we--we must never grow old; we must live and ever be full of creation as the cloud is full of lightning. We must, old pal, ride the deserts, drift over seas; we must spill our work as we go, as night spills its stars from a casket. Fill me up with the Pacific in your letters--the big sunlight--the colour of the mountains where they dip and rise to clouds. I have a dry palate for it all. Fill me--eye and ear and soul. Yours deep in those scars---- * * * * * DEAR OLD MAN: The Hudson is very still this morning; a few battleships have swung out with the tide; gulls seem to be forever passing up and down the river in white eddies; smoke from the factories rises straight and white. The morning sun strikes like a sledge upon the Palisades. How grand that old river is, and how untiring in its endless ebb and flood--almost like a solar system in the serene way it deals with human traffic. A great new sense of words has come over me lately. At the very birth of language lies a chest of rich obsolete words--quite like a Spanish treasure chest, with its doubloons, bezoar stones and "pots of Arica bronze." The artists go treasure hunting in language, and a few do startle the world with their wealth. The live-long day seems to me now like a shuttle driving back and forth, weaving from soul to matter, a golden fabric. This word-chest means much to me because it deals with the sea. Lift up the lid, and tucked away in those little drawers lies the seaman's religion in bits of turquoise, in coils of fish line and hooks, in pink sea-shells, perhaps in an old violin, or in a few stray books of Carlyle, Goethe, Dante and Melville's _Moby Dick_. The point is we all bungle along through our world-term somehow; we have our work and religion and pleasures and tales in a camphor-wood chest with a brass band around it. Sometimes we bring out the violin and make God-awful discords, calling it music of the sea; we brighten people's eyes with our bits of turquoise; terrorise them with the philosophy that Carlyle and Goethe and Moby Dick have given us; we make them feel that endless _wroom, wroom, wroom_ of the ocean that is washing in our souls.