or
schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin masts
over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate sea-port; and
which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering water,
seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails. Of the
larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted, and
passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little
sympathy with people who want to _go_ anywhere; nor caring much about
anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other
sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that
live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I
any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with
spice islands, and porterage of painted tea-chests or carved ivory; for
all this seems to me to fall under the head of commerce of the
drawing-room; costly, but not venerable. I respect in the merchant
service only those ships that carry coals, herrings, salt, timber, iron,
and such other commodities, and that have disagreeable odor, and
unwashed decks. But there are few things more impressive to me than one
of these ships lying up against some lonely quay in a black sea-fog,
with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in the harbor slime. The
noble misery that there is in it, the might of its rent and strained
unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a little while
in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still less
honored, least of all conscious of any claim to honor; casting and
craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet
truth of time; spinning of wheel, and slackening of rope, and swinging
of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its
crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly
interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or
pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above
them, entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the
patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense
of service in all that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at
utter need, not in sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbor slime and
biting fog; so drawing their breath once more, to go out again, without
lament, from between the two skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with wash of
under