rying to act as if nothing was the matter, to lead a very uncertain and
precarious existence, though with a most awful undertone of emotion,
which seemed to make quite another thing of creation.

I wonder that people who wanted to break the souls of heroes and martyrs
never thought of sending them to sea and keeping them a little seasick.
The dungeons of Olmutz, the leads of Venice, in short, all the naughty,
wicked places that tyrants ever invented for bringing down the spirits
of heroes, are nothing to the berth of a ship. Get Lafayette, Kossuth,
or the noblest of woman, born, prostrate in a swinging, dizzy berth of
one of these sea coops, called state rooms, and I'll warrant almost any
compromise might be got out of them.

Where in the world the soul goes to under such influences nobody knows;
one would really think the sea tipped it all out of a man, just as it
does the water out of his wash basin. The soul seems to be like one of
the genii enclosed in a vase, in the Arabian Nights; now, it rises like
a pillar of cloud, and floats over land and sea, buoyant, many-hued, and
glorious; again, it goes down, down, subsiding into its copper vase, and
the cover is clapped on, and there you are. A sea voyage is the best
device for getting the soul back into its vase that I know of.

But at night!--the beauties of a night on shipboard!--down in your
berth, with the sea hissing and fizzing, gurgling and booming, within an
inch of your ear; and then the steward conies along at twelve o'clock
and puts out your light, and there you are! Jonah in the whale was not
darker or more dismal. There, in profound ignorance and blindness, you
lie, and feel yourself rolled upwards, and downwards, and sidewise, and
all ways, like a cork in a tub of water; much such a sensation as one
might suppose it to be, were one headed up in a barrel and thrown into
the sea.

Occasionally a wave comes with a thump against your ear, as if a great
hammer were knocking on your barrel, to see that all within was safe and
sound. Then you begin to think of krakens, and sharks, and porpoises,
and sea serpents, and all the monstrous, slimy, cold, hobgoblin brood,
who, perhaps, are your next door neighbors; and the old blue-haired
Ocean whispers through the planks, "Here you are; I've got you. Your
grand ship is my plaything. I can do what I like with it."

Then you hear every kind of odd noise in the ship--creaking, straining,
crunching, scraping, pounding,