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 

 cortege, — a long line of grim floats and barges and 

 boxes, with their bowed and solemn derricks, the 

 paU-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 



