ring. In the opening lines the
passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:

Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
Shall suffer this fate or that:
One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
Or ground on treacherous flat.
Some shall be famed in many lands
As good ships, fast and fair,
And some shall strangely disappear,
Men know not when or where.

The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain
found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York
Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and
Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they
came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome
travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in
travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a
gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and
ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark
Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his
chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.

Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.

Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to
arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.

This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but
he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or
two of that word-picture:

After