THE SHIPWRECK. 
9 
On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I 
might have expected. If I had found one body cast 
upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have 
affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds 
and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human 
bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of 
Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity? If the 
last day were come, we should not think so much about 
the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of 
individuals. I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as 
on the field of battle, till 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 Pil- 
1 * 
