Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/325

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ABOUT ALL KINDS OF SHIPS

And this :

��And this :

��A wet sheet and a flowing sea, And a wind that follows fair.

��My foot is on my gallant deck Once more the rover is free!

��And the " Larboard Watch" the person referred to below is at the masthead, or somewhere up there :

Oh, who can tell what joy he feels, As o er the foam his vessel reels, And his tired eyelids slumb ring fall, He rouses at the welcome call

Of "Larboard watch ahoy!"

Yes, and there was forever and always some jackass- voiced person braying out:

Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep!

Other favorites had these suggestive titles: "The Storm at Sea"; "The Bird at Sea"; "The Sailor Boy s Dream"; "The Captive Pirate s Lament"; We are far from Home on the Stormy Main and so on, and so on, the list is endless. Everybody on a farm lived chiefly amid the dangers of the deep in those days, in fancy.

But all that is gone now. Not a vestige of it is left. The iron-clad, with her unsentimental aspect and frigid attention to business, banished romance from the war marine, and the unsentimental steamer has banished it from the commercial marine. The

�� �