You know how often we have longed for a sea voyage, as the fulfilment of all our dreams of poetry and romance, the realization of our highest conceptions of free, joyous existence.

You remember our ship-launching parties in Maine, when we used to ride to the seaside through dark pine forests, lighted up with the gold, scarlet, and orange tints of autumn.  What exhilaration there was, as those beautiful inland bays, one by one, unrolled like silver ribbons before us! and how all our sympathies went forth with the grand new ship about to be launched!  How graceful and noble a thing she looked, as she sprang from the shore to the blue waters, like a human soul springing from life into immortality!  How all our feelings went with her! how we longed to be with her, and a part of her—­to go with her to India, China, or any where, so that we might rise and fall on the bosom of that magnificent ocean, and share a part of that glorified existence!  That ocean! that blue, sparkling, heaving, mysterious ocean, with all the signs and wonders of heaven emblazoned on its bosom, and another world of mystery hidden beneath its waters!  Who would not long to enjoy a freer communion, and rejoice in a prospect of days spent in unreserved fellowship with its grand and noble nature?

Alas! what a contrast between all this poetry and the real prose fact of going to sea!  No man, the proverb says, is a hero to his valet de chambre.  Certainly, no poet, no hero, no inspired prophet, ever lost so much on near acquaintance as this same mystic, grandiloquent old Ocean.  The one step from the sublime to the ridiculous is never taken with such alacrity as in a sea voyage.

In the first place, it is a melancholy fact, but not the less true, that ship life is not at all fragrant; in short, particularly on a steamer, there is a most mournful combination of grease, steam, onions, and dinners in general, either past, present, or to come, which, floating invisibly in the atmosphere, strongly predisposes to that disgust of existence, which, in half an hour after sailing, begins to come upon you; that disgust, that strange, mysterious, ineffable sensation which steals slowly and inexplicably upon you; which makes every heaving billow, every white-capped wave, the ship, the people, the sight, taste, sound, and smell of every thing a matter of inexpressible loathing!  Man cannot utter it.

It is really amusing to watch the gradual progress of this epidemic; to see people stepping on board in the highest possible feather, alert, airy, nimble, parading the deck, chatty and conversable, on the best possible terms with themselves and mankind generally; the treacherous ship, meanwhile, undulating and heaving in the most graceful rises and pauses imaginable, like some voluptuous waltzer; and then to see one after another yielding to the mysterious spell!

Your poet launches forth, “full of sentiment sublime as billows,” discoursing magnificently on the color of the waves and the glory of the clouds; but gradually he grows white about the mouth, gives sidelong looks towards the stairway; at last, with one desperate plunge, he sets, to rise no more!