FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 231 



You feel every wave that strikes her, you feel the sea 

 bearing her down, she has run her nose into one of 

 those huge swells, and a solid blue wall of water tons 

 in weight comes over her bows and floods her forward 

 deck, she braces herself, every rod and rivet and tim- 

 ber seems to lend its support, you almost expect to see 

 the wooden walls of your room grow rigid with mus- 

 cular contraction ; she trembles from stem to stern, 

 she recovers, she breaks the gripe of her antagonist 

 and rising up, shakes the sea from her with a kind of 

 gleeful wrath ; I hear the torrents of water rush along 

 the lower decks, and finding a means of escape, pour 

 back into the sea, glad to get away on any terms, and 

 I say, H Noble ship ! you are indeed a god ! 99 



I wanted to see a first-class storm at sea, and perhaps 

 ought to be satisfied with the heavy blow or hurricane 

 we had when off Sable Islands, but I confess I was 

 not, though, by the lying to of the vessel and the fre- 

 quent soundings, it was evident there was danger about. 

 A dense fog uprose, which did not drift like a land fog, 

 but was as immovable as iron ; it was like a spell, a 

 misty enchantment, and out of this fog came the wind, 

 a steady, booming blast, that smote the ship over on 

 her side and held her there and howled in the rigging 

 like a chorus of fiends. The waves did not know 

 which way to flee ; they were heaped up and then 

 scattered in a twinkling. I thought of the terrible 

 line of one of our poets : — 



" The spasm of the sky and the shatter of the sea." 



