h's shop was in
the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so
that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no
unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of
her young-armed old husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by
passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly,
in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's
infants were rocked to slumber.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst
thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon
him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a
truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and
all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some
virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the
responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless
old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to
harvest.

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last;
the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly
gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the
forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived
down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her
thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond
in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen
curls!

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death
is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but
the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the
Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of
such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against
suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly
spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and
wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite
Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither,
broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come
hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
abhorring, landed world