290 AT SEA. 



more impressive to th.e imagination than to the actual 

 sense. The world is left behind; all standards of 

 size, of magnitude, of distance, are vanished ; there 

 is no size, no form, no perspective ; the universe has 

 dwindled to a little circle of crumpled water, that 

 journeys with you day after day, and to which you 

 seem bound by some enchantment. The sky becomes a 

 shallow, close-fitting dome, or else a pall of cloud that 

 seems ready to descend upon you. You cannot see 

 or realize the vast and vacant surrounding ; there is 

 nothing to define it or set it off. Three thousand 

 miles of ocean space are less impressive than three 

 miles bounded by rugged mountain walls. Indeed, 

 the grandeur of form, of magnitude, of distance, of 

 proportion are only upon shore. A voyage across the 

 Atlantic is an eight or ten-day sail through vacancy. 

 There is no sensible progress ; you pass no fixed 

 points. Is it the steamer that is moving, or is it the 

 sea ? or is it all a dance and illusion of the troubled 

 brain ? Yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, you are in 

 the same parenthesis of nowhere. The three hun- 

 dred or more miles the ship daily makes is ideal, not 

 real. Every night the stars dance and reel there in 

 the same place amid the rigging ; every morning the 

 sun comes up from behind the same wave, and stag- 

 gers slowly across the sinister sky. The eye becomes 

 a-hunger for form, for permanent lines, for a horizon 

 wall to lift up and keep off the sky, and give it a 

 sense of room. One understands why sailors become 

 an imaginative and superstitious race ; it is the reac- 



