It was Rhenish wine shipped from Paris.
My friend explained to me, after his rhapsody was over, that the box
having been brought across the ocean in the hold of a steamer, retained
a subtle scent of bilge-water, that brought the sea with all its
dangerous fascination back to him—he having served all his young life
before the mast. He was, at this writing, a plain, staid farmer, content
among his cattle and clover. And yet that sharp, briny, saline flavor,
thrown on the bosom of the still country breeze, put a restless devil in
his breast. It was as if a born gallant, exiled for a decade to the
heart of some desert, should, near the expiration of his sentence,
stumble upon a cambric handkerchief, redolent with the perfume of a
lady’s boudoir. In less than two years after the sight or rather the
smell of that box my friend had sold his plantation, convinced his wife,
and gone to the ocean again. Had Dr. Berckmans been content to drink
native wine, Mr. Graves would yet be alternating cotton with clover, in
the peaceful valley of the Etowah.
After this strong proof of the fascination that the sea has for its
votaries, I achieved a strong desire to try it for myself. It renewed in
my mature days the wild ambition that put turmoil into my schoolboy
life, after I had read “Lafitte, or the Pirate of the Gulf.”
I have longed for many a day to run a “gore” into each leg of my
pantaloons, roll back my collar, tousle my hair, fold my cloak about my
shoulders, and stand before the mast in a stiff breeze, and there read
Byron with one eye, and with the other watch the effect of the tableau
on the female passengers.
I never had a chance to gratify the desire until lately. I never saw the
ocean until the trip that results in this letter; I shall never forget
the impression it made on me.
I had imagined that it would be a moment of ecstasy. I had believed that
my soul, in the glad recognition of something as infinite, as
illimitable as itself, would laugh with joy, and leap to my lips, and
burn in my fingers, and tingle in my veins. I wisely reserved the first
sight until we had steamed out beyond the land, and then with the air of
one who unchains himself, I raised my head and looked out to the future.
There, as far as the eye could reach, aye, and way beyond, as if mocking
the finiteness of sight, stretched the blue waters. Ah! how my fine-spun
fancies crumbled and came tumbling back on me in dire confusion! My soul
literally shriveled! My very imagination was cowed and driven to its
corner, and I sat there dumb and trembling!
No tenant of a cradle was ever more simple or more trusting than I
became at that moment. I literally rejoiced in the abrogation of all the
pride and manliness that I had boasted of two hours before. I flung away
my self-dependence, and my soul ran abashed into the hollow of His hand,
even as a frightened child runs to its father’s arms. As I looked
shuddering upon the vast and restless waste of waters in front of me, I
felt as if some person had taken me to the confines of that time which
human calculation can compass, and holding me on the chill edge of that
gulf called the Eternal, had asked me to translate its meaning, and
pronounce its uttermost boundary.
I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was about scared to death;
certain it is that I crouched there for hours, trembling, and yet gazing
out beyond me upon the lapping waters, from where they parted before our
ship to where they curled up against the half-consenting sky! At last I
arose, shook myself, as if throwing off some nightmare, and sought the
crowd again.
I can never forget how dissonant and inopportune the flippant
conversation of the voyagers seemed to me to be at that time. It was as
if some revelers should jest and shout in a great church. With the awful
abyss in front, and these prattlers to the rear, one had the two
extremes. There was God in the deep and awful stillness ahead, and the
world behind in the chatter and gayety that rang out “like a man’s
cracked laughter heard way down in hell.”
The first man’s voice that I heard, as I turned away from the solemn
hush of the Eternal that yawned before us, was that of a young fellow
who remarked to his chum rhapsodically (evidently alluding to some
female acquaintance), “Why, she had a leg on her like a government
mule.” These words bit into my memory as if they were cut there by
white-hot pincers.