We were now passing Nahant, and we should have seen Longfellow’s cottage and the waves beating on the rocks before it, if we had been near enough.  As it was, we could only faintly distinguish the headland and note the white beach of Lynn.  The fact is, that in travel one is almost as much dependent upon imagination and memory as he is at home.  Somehow, we seldom get near enough to anything.  The interest of all this coast which we had come to inspect was mainly literary and historical.  And no country is of much interest until legends and poetry have draped it in hues that mere nature cannot produce.  We looked at Nahant for Longfellow’s sake; we strained our eyes to make out Marblehead on account of Whittier’s ballad; we scrutinized the entrance to Salem Harbor because a genius once sat in its decaying custom-house and made of it a throne of the imagination.  Upon this low shore line, which lies blinking in the midday sun, the waves of history have beaten for two centuries and a half, and romance has had time to grow there.  Out of any of these coves might have sailed Sir Patrick Spens “to Noroway, to Noroway,”

   “They hadna sailed upon the sea
   A day but barely three,

   Till loud and boisterous grew the wind,
   And gurly grew the sea.”

The sea was anything but gurly now; it lay idle and shining in an August holiday.  It seemed as if we could sit all day and watch the suggestive shore and dream about it.  But we could not.  No man, and few women, can sit all day on those little round penitential stools that the company provide for the discomfort of their passengers.  There is no scenery in the world that can be enjoyed from one of those stools.  And when the traveler is at sea, with the land failing away in his horizon, and has to create his own scenery by an effort of the imagination, these stools are no assistance to him.  The imagination, when one is sitting, will not work unless the back is supported.  Besides, it began to be cold; notwithstanding the shiny, specious appearance of things, it was cold, except in a sheltered nook or two where the sun beat.  This was nothing to be complained of by persons who had left the parching land in order to get cool.  They knew that there would be a wind and a draught everywhere, and that they would be occupied nearly all the time in moving the little stools about to get out of the wind, or out of the sun, or out of something that is inherent in a steamboat.  Most people enjoy riding on a steamboat, shaking and trembling and chow-chowing along in pleasant weather out of sight of land; and they do not feel any ennui, as may be inferred from the intense excitement which seizes them when a poor porpoise leaps from the water half a mile away.  “Did you see the porpoise?” makes conversation for an hour.  On our steamboat there was a man who said he saw a whale, saw him just as plain, off to the east, come up to blow; appeared to be a young one.  I wonder where all these men come from who always see a whale.  I never was on a sea-steamer yet that there was not one of these men.