bring and lay lovingly at the roots of
black oak and sweet gum, hickory and stag-horn sumac. Here is
bamboo that for all I know grew near the head waters of the
Orinoco, though it may have sprouted in the Bahamas, floated north
by the Gulf Stream, shunted from its warm edge into the chill of
the Labrador current and drawn thence by the Cohasset tides.
Beside this lies a cask ripped from the deck of a Gloucester
fishing schooner that sought the halibut even on the chill banks
that lie just south of the point of Greenland. And so they come,
chips from a Maine shipyard, wreckage from a Bermuda reef, and a
thousand tiny things picked up at points between.

But the tides bring to the marsh and the island in it, to all
shores that they touch here on our Atlantic seaboard, more than
this. They bear deep in their emerald hearts, generated in their
cool, clear depths, a rich vivific principle that bears vigor to
all that they touch and sends rich emanations forth on the air
beyond. Today on the inland hills and land-bound pastures the sun
beat in sullen insolence and the wind from the west scorched and
wilted the life in all things. The same wind, coming to me across
two miles of salt marsh, had in its cool, salty aroma a life-giving
principle that set the pulse to bounding and renewed vigor.
It had gathered up from the marsh this tonic of the tides, this
elixir vitae which all the doctors of the world have sought in
vain. Some day some one of them, wiser than the rest, will distil
its potency from the cool salt of sea tides, and humanity, poor
hitherto, will find itself rich in possibilities of physical
immortality. Sea captains have a foolish custom of settling down
at eighty to enjoy life on shore, else there is no knowing how
long they would live. They have breathed the aroma of this
life-giving essence all their lives.

Yet the sea itself is dead; it is a vast accumulation of the
product of complete combustion, hydrogen burnt out. But just as
dead worlds, which are the molecules of infinite space, shocking
together, burst into spiral nebulae of flame which are the
beginnings of live suns and planets and all luxuriant life
thereon, so it seems as if the atoms of sea water, ever rushing to
restless collision, burst continually into renewed life. All forms
are in it, from the mightiest mammals to the protozoa which the
microscope suspects rather than surely discovers. Every time
molecule touches molecule in the depths, a n