TOUCHES OF NATURE 53 
the winter mornings see its glancing, meteoric lights, 
or in summer its white form bursting through the 
silence and the shadows, its plume of smoke lying 
flat upon its roofs and stretching far behind, —a 
sight better than a battle. It is something of the 
same feeling one has in witnessing any wild, free 
careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or in 
beholding the charge of an army; or in listening to 
an eloquent man, or to a hundred instruments of 
music in full blast, —it is triumph, victory. What 
is eloquence but mass in motion, —a flood, a cata- 
ract, an express train, a cavalry charge? We are 
literally carried away, swept from our feet, and 
recover our senses again as best we can. 
I experienced the same emotion when I saw them 
go by with the sunken steamer. The procession 
moved slowly and solemnly. It was like a funeral 
cortége, —a long line of grim floats and barges and 
boxes, with their bowed and solemn derricks, the 
pall-bearers, and underneath in her watery grave, 
where she had been for six months, the sunken 
steamer, partially lifted and borne along. Next day 
the procession went back again, and the spectacle 
was still more eloquent. ‘The steamer had been 
taken to the flats above and raised till her walking- 
beam was out of water; her bell also was exposed 
and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers’ Herculean 
labor seemed nearly over. But that night the winds 
and the storms held high carnival. It looked like 
preconcerted action on the part of tide, tempest, and 
rain to defeat these wreckers, for the elements all 
