296 THE OCEAN. 
lamps of heaven and the luminous appearances of the 
deep. The silence was only broken by the murmurs 
of the breeze passing through our matting sails, or 
the dashing of the spray from the bows of our boat, 
excepting at times, when we heard, or fancied we 
heard, the blowing of a shoal of porpoises, or the 
more alarming sounds of a spouting whale. 
“ At a season such as this, when I have reflected 
on our actual situation, so far removed, in the event 
of any casualty, from human observation and assist- 
ance, and preserved from certain death only by a few 
feet of thin board, which my own unskilful hands 
had nailed together, a sense of the wakeful care of 
the Almighty has alone afforded composure. 
“The contemplation of the heavenly bodies, al- 
though they exhibit the wisdom and majesty of God, 
who ‘bringeth out their host by number, and call- 
eth them all by names, by the greatness of His 
might,’ impressed at the same time the conviction 
that I was far from home, and those scenes which 
in memory were associated with a starlight evening 
in the land I had left.. Many of the stars which 
I had beheld in England were visible here: the 
constellations of the zodiac, the splendours of Orion, 
and the mild twinkling of the Pleiades, were seen; 
but the northern pole-star, the steady beacon of 
juvenile astronomical observation, the Great Bear, 
and much that was peculiar to a northern sky, were 
wanting. The effect of mental associations, con- 
nected with the appearance of the heavens, is sin- 
gular and impressive. During a voyage which I 
subsequently made to the Sandwich Islands, many 
