It is my belief that that larger Self whom they will call
protecting Saint or heavenly Guardian takes hand in affairs
oftener than we think! Leaving the Palos road, I went to
the sea as I had done yesterday and again sat under heaped
sand with about me a sere grass through which the wind
whined. At first it whined and then it sang in a thin, outlandish
voice. Sitting thus, I might have looked toward
Africa, but I knew now that I was not going to Africa.
Often, perhaps, in the unremembered past I had been in
Africa; often, doubtless, in ages to come its soil would be
under my foot, but now I was not going there! To-day I
looked westward over River-Ocean, unknown to our fathers
and unknown to ourselves. It was unknown as the future
of the world.

Ocean piled before me. From where I lay it seemed to
run uphill to one pale line, nor blue nor white, set beneath
the solid gray. Over that hilltop, what? Only other hills
and plains, water, endlessly water, until the waves, so much
mightier than waves of that blue sea we knew best, should
beat at last against Asia shore! So high, so deep, so vast,
so real, yet so empty-seeming save for strange dangers! No
sails over the hilltop; no sails in all that Vast save close at
hand where mariners held to the skirts of Mother. Europe.
Ocean vast, Ocean black, Ocean unknown. Yet there, too,
life and the knowing of life ran somehow continuous.

It wiled me from my smaller self. How had we all
suffered, we the whole earth! But we were moving, we the
world with none left out, moving toward That which held