The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my Latin.  No, sir, I said,—­you need not trouble yourself.  There is a higher law in grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and Stoddard.  Then I went on.

Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the like of in these our New England sovereignties.  There is nothing in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful, which has not found its home in that ocean-principality.  It has welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great statesman who turned his back on the affairs of empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the keenest and his story the best.

[I don’t believe any man ever talked like that in this world.  I don’t believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one’s conversation, one cannot help Blair-ing it up more or less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the looking-glass.]

——­How can a man help writing poetry in such a place?  Everybody does write poetry that goes there.  In the state archives, kept in the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished verse,—­some by well-known hands, and others, quite as good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers,—­men who could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had left.  Of course I had to write my little copy of verses with the rest; here it is, if you will hear me read it.  When the sun is in the west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction look bright or dark to one who observes them from the north or south, according to the tack they are sailing upon.  Watching them from one of the windows of the great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and moralized thus:—­

  As I look from the isle, o’er its billows of green
    To the billows of foam-crested blue,
  Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
    Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue: 
  Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
    As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
  Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
    The sun gleaming bright on her sail.

  Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,—­
    Of breakers that whiten and roar;
  How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
    They see him that gaze from the shore! 
  He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
    To the rock that is under his lee,
  As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
    O’er the gulfs of the desolate sea.