rises and falls with the slow breathing of the sleeping sea, one greasy, brassy swell following another, slow, smooth, immitigable as the series of Wordsworth's 5' Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Even at his best, Neptune, in a tête-à-tête, has a way of repeating himself, an obtuseness to the ne quid nimis, that is stupefying. It reminds me of organ-music and my good 10 friend Sebastian Bach. A fugue or two will do very well; but a concert made up of nothing else is altogether too epic for me. There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer 15 wonder at the cruelty of pirates. Fancy an existence in which the coming up of a clumsy finback whale, who says Pooh! to you solemnly as you lean over the taffrail, is an event as exciting as an elec20 tion on shore! The dampness seems to strike into the wits as into the lucifermatches, so that one may scratch a thought half a dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint sputter, the forlorn hope of fire, which only goes far enough to leave a sense of suffocation behind it. Even smoking becomes an employment instead of a solace. Who less likely to come to their wit's end than W. M. T. and A. H. C.? Yet I have seen them driven to five meals a day for mental occupation. I sometimes sit and pity Noah; but even he had this advantage over all succeeding navigators, that, wherever he landed, he was sure to get no ill news from home. He should be canonized as the patron-saint of newspaper correspondents, being the only man who ever had the very last authentic intelligence from everywhere. The sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as mountains are from the plain. 25 Lucretius made this discovery long ago, and was blunt enough to blurt it forth, romance and sentiment in other words, the pretense of feeling what we do not feel being inventions of a later day. 30 To be sure, Cicero used to twaddle about Greek literature and philosophy, much as people do about ancient art nowadays; but I rather sympathize with those stout old Romans who despised both, and be- 35 lieved that to found an empire was as grand an achievement as to build an epic or to carve a statue. But though there might have been twaddle (as why not, since there was a Senate?) I rather think 40 Petrarch was the first choragus of that sentimental dance which so long led young folks away from the realities of life like the piper of Hamelin, and whose succession ended, let us hope, with Chateaubriand. But for them, Byron, whose real strength lay in his sincerity, would never have talked about the sea bounding beneath him like a steed that knows his rider,' and all that sort of thing. Even if 50 it had been true, steam has been as fatal to that part of the romance of the sea as to hand-loom weaving. But what say you to a twelve days' calm such as we dozed through in mid-Atlantic and in midAugust? I know nothing so tedious at once and exasperating as that regular slap of the wilted sails when the ship The finback whale recorded just above has much the look of a brown-paper parcel, the whitish stripes that run across him answering for the pack-thread. He 45 has a kind of accidental hole in the top of his head, through which he pooh-poohs the rest of creation, and which looks as if it had been made by the chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He was our first event. Our second was harpooning a sunfish, which basked dozing on the lap of the sea, looking so much like the giant turtle of an alderman's dream, that I am persuaded he would have made mockturtle soup rather than acknowledge his imposture. But he broke away just as they were hauling him over the side, and sank placidly through the clear water, 55 leaving behind him a crimson trail that wavered a moment and was gone. The sea, though, has better sights than these. When we were up with the Azores, we began to meet flying-fish and Portuguese men-of-war beautiful as the galley of Cleopatra, tiny craft that dared these seas before Columbus. I have seen one of the former rise from the crest of a wave, and, glancing from another some 10 two hundred feet beyond, take a fresh flight of perhaps as long. How Calderon would have similized this pretty creature had he ever seen it! How would he have run him up and down the gamut of simile! 15 If a fish, then a fish with wings; if a bird, then a bird, with fins; and so on, keeping up the light shuttle-cock of a conceit as is his wont. Indeed, the poor thing is the most killing bait for a com- 20 parison, and I assure you I have three or four in my inkstand; — but be calm, they shall stay there. Moore, who looked on all nature as a kind of Gradus ad Parnassum, a thesaurus of similitude, and spent 25 his life in a game of What is my thought like? with himself, did the flying-fish on his way to Bermuda. So I leave him in peace. The most beautiful thing I have seen 30 at sea, all the more so that I had never heard of it, is the trail of a shoal of fish through the phosphorescent water. It is like a flight of silver rockets, or the streaming of northern lights through that 35 silent nether heaven. I thought nothing could go beyond that rustling star-foam which was churned up by our ship's bows, or those eddies and disks of dreamy flame that rose and wandered out of sight be- 40 hind us. 'T was fire our ship was plunging through, ered to a pinkish scum on the surface. The sea had been so phosphorescent for some nights, that when the Captain gave me my bath, by dousing me with buckets 5 from the house on deck, the spray flew off my head and shoulders in sparks. It occurred to me that this dirty-looking scum might be the luminous matter, and I had a pailful dipped up to keep till after dark. When I went to look at it after nightfall, it seemed at first perfectly dead; but when I shook it, the whole broke out into what I can only liken to milky flames, whose lambent silence was strangely beautiful, and startled me almost as actual projection might an alchemist. I could not bear to be the death of so much beauty; so I poured it all overboard again. Another sight worth taking a voyage for is that of the sails by moonlight. Our course was 'south and by east, half south,' so that we seemed bound for the full moon as she rolled up over our wavering horizon. Then I used to go forward to the bowsprit and look back. Our ship was a clipper, with every rag set, stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all; nor was it easy to believe that such a wonder could be built of canvas as that white many-storied pile of cloud that stooped over me or drew back as we rose and fell with the waves. These are all the wonders I can recall of my five weeks at sea, except the sun. Were you ever alone with the sun? You think it a very simple question; but I never was, in the full sense of the word, till I was held up to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler of the ocean. I suppose one might have the same feeling in the desert. I remember getting something like it years ago, when I climbed alone to the top of a mountain, 45 and lay face up on the hot gray moss, striving to get a notion of how an Arab might feel. It was my American commentary of the Koran, and not a bad one. In a New England winter, too, when everything is gagged with snow, as if some gigantic physical geographer were taking a cast of the earth's face in plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce you to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea you may be alone with him day after day, and almost all day long. I never understood before that nothing short of full daylight can give the suprein 50 But there was something even more deli- est sense of solitude. Darkness will not do so, for the imagination peoples it with more shapes than ever were poured from the frozen loins of the populous North. The sun, I sometimes think, is a little grouty at sea, especially at high noon, feeling that he wastes his beams on those fruitless furrows. It is otherwise with the moon. She comforts the night,' as Chapman finely says, and I always found 10 her a companionable creature. Through slopes of sun, through shadows The coupled monks show-climbing sing, 5 From rear to front, from front to rear In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. It is the true magic-circle of expectation and conjecture, almost as good as a wishing-ring. What will rise 15 over that edge we sail towards daily and never overtake? A sail? an island? the new shore of the Old World? Something rose every day, which I need not have gone so far to see, but at whose levee 20 I was a much more faithful courtier than on shore. A cloudless sunrise in midocean is beyond comparison for simple grandeur. It is like Dante's style, bare and perfect. Naked sun meets naked sea, 25 the true classic of nature. There may be more sentiment in morning on shore, the shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the silver point-lace of sparkling hoar-frost, - but there is also more complexity, more 30 of the romantic. The one savors of the elder Edda, the other of the Minnesingers. Tells that the golden sunrise-tide To San Miniato's open door, In long procession, chanting clear, I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed our prosy lives with mystery and conjecture. But one is shut up on shipboard like Montaigne in his tower, with nothing to do but to review his own thoughts and contradict himself. Dire, redire, et me contredire, will be the staple of my journal till I see land. I say nothing of such matters as the montagna bruna on which Ulysses wrecked; but since the sixteenth century could any man reasonably hope to stumble on one of those wonders which were cheap as dirt in the days of St. Saga? Faustus, Don Juan, and Tanhäuser are the last ghosts of legend, that lingered almost till the Gallic cockcrow of universal enlightenment and disillusion. The Public School has done for Imagination. What shall I see in Outre-Mer, or on the way thither, but what can be seen with eyes? To be sure, I stick by the sea-serpent, and would 35 fain believe that science has scotched, not killed, him. Nor is he to be lightly given up, for, like the old Scandinavian snake, he binds together for us the two hemispheres of Past and Present, of Belief and 40 Science. He is the link which knits us seaboard Yankees with our Norse progenitors, interpreting between the age of the dragon and that of the railroadtrain. We have made ducks and drakes 45 of that large estate of wonder and delight bequeathed to us by ancestral vikings, and this alone remains to us unthrift Heirs of Linn. I feel an undefined respect for a man So who has seen the sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers what the poet is to his fellow-men. Where they have seen nothing better than a school of horse-mackerel, or the idle coils of ocean round 55 Half-way Rock, he has caught authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantle-hem of the Edda age. I care not for the monster himself. It is not the thing, but the belief in the thing, that is dear to me. May it be long before Professor Owen is comforted with the sight of his unfleshed vertebrae, long before they stretch many a rood behind Kimball's or Barnum's glass, reflected in the shallow orbs of Mr. and Mrs. Public, which stare, but see not! When we read that Captain Spalding, of the pink-stern Three Pollies, has beheld him rushing through the brine 10 like an infinite series of bewitched mackerel-casks, we feel that the mystery of old Ocean, at least, has not yet been sounded, that Faith and Awe survive there unevaporate. I once ventured the 15 thinks it full time to indulge us in a horse-mackerel theory to an old fisherman, browner than a tomcod. mackril!' he exclaimed indignantly, hosmackril be' (here he used a phrase commonly indicated in laical literature by 20 the same sign which served for Doctorate in Divinity), don't yer spose I know a hos-mackril?' The intonation of that 'I' would have silenced Professor Monkbarns Owen with his provoking phoca forever. 25 What if one should ask him if he knew a trilobite? Even Deity is subjected to chemic tests. We must have exact knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of facts pressed, dried, or preserved in spirits, instead of the large, 5 vague world our fathers had. With them science was poetry; with us, poetry is science. Our modern Eden is a hortus siccus. Tourists defraud rather than enrich us. They have not that sense of æsthetic proportion which characterized the elder traveler. Earth is no longer the fine work of art it was, for nothing is left to the imagination. Job Hortop, arrived at the height of the Bermudas, Hos The fault of modern travelers is, that they see nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene periods and tertiary forma- 30 tions, and tell us how the world looked to the plesiosaur. They take science (or nescience) with them, instead of that soul of generous trust their elders had. All their senses are skeptics and doubters, 35 materialists reporting things for other skeptics to doubt still further upon. Nature becomes a reluctant witness upon the stand, badgered with geologist hammers and phials of acid. There have been no 40 travelers since those included in Hakluyt and Purchas, except Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch or two into the invisible at the Orkneys. We have peripatetic lecturers, but no more travelers. Travelers' 45 stories are no longer proverbial. We have picked nearly every apple (wormy or otherwise) from the world's tree of knowledge, and that without an Eve to tempt us. Two or three have hitherto 50 hung luckily beyond reach on a lofty bough shadowing the interior of Africa, but here is a German Doctor at this very moment pelting at them with sticks and stones. It may be only next week, and 55 these too, bitten by geographers and geologists, will be thrown away. Analysis is carried into everything. merman. Nay, there is a story told by Webster, in his Witchcraft, of a merman with a miter, who, on being sent back to his watery diocese of finland, made what advances he could toward an episcopal benediction by bowing his head thrice. Doubtless he had been consecrated by St. Antony of Padua. A dumb bishop would be sometimes no unpleasant phenomenon, by the way. Sir John Hawkins is not satisfied with telling us about the merely sensual Canaries, but is generous enough to throw us in a handful of certain flitting islands' to boot. Henry Hawkes describes the visible Mexican cities, and then is not so frugal but that he can give us a few invisible ones. Thus do these generous ancient mariners make children of us again. Their successors show us an earth effete and past bearing, tracing out with the eyes of industrious fleas every wrinkle and crow foot. The journals of the elder navigators. are prose Odysseys. The geographies of our ancestors were works of fancy and imagination. They read poems where we yawn over items. Their world was a huge wonder-horn, exhaustless as that which Thor strove to drain. Ours would scarce quench the small thirst of a bee. No modern voyager brings back the magical foundation-stones of a Tempest. No Marco Polo, traversing the desert beyond the city of Lok, would tell of things able to inspire the mind of Milton with 'Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.' It was easy enough to believe the story of Dante, when two-thirds of even the 5 together as easily as the fragments of a REVIEW OF WHITTIER'S HOME His upper-world were yet untraversed and unmapped. With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautifully pictured notes of the Possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard and tumbrous coin of the Actual. How are we not defrauded and impoverished? Does California vie with El Dorado? or are Bruce's Abyssinian kings a set-off 10 for Prester John? A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. And if the philosophers have not even yet been able to agree whether the world has an existence independent of ourselves, how do we 15 not gain a loss in every addition to the catalogue of Vulgar Errors? Where are the fishes which nidificated in trees? Where the monopodes sheltering themselves from the sun beneath their sin- 20 gle umbrella-like foot,- umbrella-like in everything but the fatal necessity of being borrowed? Where the Acephali, with whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy, wound up his climax of men with abnormal top-pieces? Where the Roc whose eggs are possibly boulders, needing no farfetched theory of glacier or iceberg to account for them? Where the tails of the men of Kent? Where the no legs of the bird of paradise? Where the Unicorn, with that single horn of his, sovereign against all manner of poisons? Where the Fountain of Youth? Where that Thessalian spring, which, without 35 cost to the country, convicted and punished perjurers? Where the Amazons of Orellana? All these, and a thousand other varieties, we have lost, and have got nothing instead of them. And those 40 who have robbed us of them have stolen that which not enriches themselves. It is so much wealth cast into the sea beyond all approach of diving-bells. We owe no thanks to Mr. J. E. Worcester, 45 tained from newspaper-columns that con 30 whose Geography we studied enforcedly The natural product of a creed which ignores the æsthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from titlepage to colophon there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse, that brewed a cup, neither cheering unduly nor inebriating, out of the emptyings of Wordsworth's teapot. How that little busy B. improved each shining hour, how neatly he laid his wax, it gives us a cold shiver to think of,- ancora ci raccappriccia! Against a copy of verses signed B. B.,' as we remember them in the hardy Annuals that went to seed so many years ago, we should warm our incautious offspring as an experienced duck might her brood against a charge of B. B. shot. It behooves men to be careful; for one may chance to suffer lifelong from these intrusions of cold lead in early life, as duellists sometimes carry all their days a bullet from which no surgery can relieve them. Memory avenges our abuses of her, and, as an awful example, we mention the fact that we have never been able to forget certain stanzas of another B. B., who, unIder the title of Boston Bard, whilom ob cession which gods and men would unanimously have denied him. George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him crazy, as half-truths are wont. But the inward light, whatever else it might be, was surely not of that kind that never was on land or sea.' There has been much that w poetical in the lives of Quakers, little in the men themselves. Poetry demands richer and more various culture, an |