have borne to the courage and glory of men, it never
seems to have offered itself to their danger, and associated itself with
their acts, as a ship of battle can. The mere facts of motion, and
obedience to human guidance, double the interest of the vessel: nor less
her organized perfectness, giving her the look, and partly the character
of a living creature, that may indeed be maimed in limb or decrepit in
frame, but must either live or die, and cannot be added to nor
diminished from--heaped up and dragged down--as a building can. And this
particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief
victory--prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson
death--surely, if ever anything without a soul deserved honour or
affection, we owed them here. Those sails that strained so full bent
into the battle--that broad bow that struck the surf aside, enlarging
silently in steadfast haste full front to the shot--resistless and
without reply--those triple ports whose choirs of flame rang forth in
their courses, into the fierce revenging monotone, which, when it died
away, left no answering voice to rise any more upon the sea against the
strength of England--those sides that were wet with the long runlets of
English life-blood, like press planks at vintage, gleaming goodly
crimson down to the cast and clash of the washing foam--those pale masts
that stayed themselves up against the war-ruin, shaking out their
ensigns through the thunder, till sail and ensign drooped--steeped in
the death-stilled pause of Andalusian air, burning with its
witness-clouds of human souls at rest,--surely, for these some sacred
care might have been left in our thoughts, some quiet space amidst the
lapse of English waters? Nay, not so. We have stern keepers to trust her
glory to--the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunset lay golden robe
on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding.
Perhaps, where the low gate opens to some cottage-garden, the tired
traveller may ask, idly, why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood;
and even the sailor's child may not answer, nor know, that the night-dew
lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old _Temeraire_. And,
_lastly_, the pathos of the picture--the contrast of the old ship's past
glory with her present end; and the spectacle of the "old order" of the
ship of the line whose flag had braved the battle and the breeze,
yielding place to the new, in the little steam-