Henry Beston

Henry Beston is also the author of White Pine and Blue Water, Northern Farm, Saint Lawrence, and articles in numerous periodicals.

A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. The Outermost House, 1928.

 

Creation is here and now. Ibid.

 

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Ibid.

 

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. Ibid.

 

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. Ibid.

 

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time. Ibid.

 

Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be a man. Ibid.

 

The seas are the heart's blood of the earth. Ibid.

 

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of

wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of the outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful, and varied. Ibid.

 

. . . Listen to the surf, really lend it to your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea. Ibid.

 

. . . I chanced to look up a moment at the southern sky, and there for the first and still the only time in my life, I saw a flight of swans. The birds were passing along the coast well out to sea; they were flying almost cloud high and traveling very fast, and their course was as direct as an arrow's from a bow. Glorious white birds in the blue October Heights over the solemn unrest of ocean - their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals. Ibid.

 

Creation is still going on, the creative forces are as great as and as active today as they have ever been, and tomorrow's morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Ibid.