WRECKS AND MI NOT LIGHT. 469 



they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the 

 common lot of humanity. Take all the graveyards together, they 

 are always the majority. It is the individual and private that 

 demands our sympathy. A man can attend but one funeral in 

 the course of his life, can behold but one corpse. Yet I saw that 

 the inhabitants of the shore would be not a little affected by this 

 event. They would watch there many days and nights for the 

 sea to give up its dead, and their imaginations and sympathies 

 would supply the place of mourners far away, who as yet knew 

 not of the wreck. Many days after this, something white was 

 seen floating on the water by one who was sauntering on the 

 beach. It was approached in a boat, and found to be the body 

 of a woman, which had risen in an upright position, whose white 

 cap was blown back with the wind. I saw that the beauty of the 

 shore itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he 

 could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks 

 like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still. 



Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends 

 but the worms or fishes. Their owners were coming to the New 

 World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did, — they were within a 

 mile of its shores ; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated 

 to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of 

 whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and 

 convincing evidence — though it has not yet been discovered by 

 science — than Cohmibus had of this ; not merely mariners' tales 

 and some paltry driftwood and seaweed, but a continual drift 

 and instinct to all our shores. I saw their empty hulks that came 

 to land ; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some 

 shore yet further west, toward which we are all tending, and 

 which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm and dark- 

 ness, as they did. No doubt, we have reason to thank God that 

 they have not been " shipwrecked into life again." The mariner 

 who makes the safest port in Heaven, perchance, seems to his 

 friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem Boston Harbor 

 the better place ; though perhaps invisible to them, a skillful 

 pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow 

 off that coast, his good ship makes the land in halcyon days, and 

 he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in 

 the surf here. It is hard to part with one's body, but, no doubt, 



