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.

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,