To see shipping at home we must make our tortuous way to the Pool; Rotterdam has the Pool in her midst.

Great ships pass up and down all day.

The Thames, once its bustling mercantile life is cut short by London Bridge, dwindles to a stream of pleasure; the Maas becomes the Rhine.
Walt Whitman is the only writer who has done justice to a great harbour, and he only by that sheer force of enumeration which in this connection rather stands for than is poetry.

As a matter of fact it is the reader of such an inventory as we find in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that is the poet: Whitman is only the machinery.

Whitman gives the suggestion and the reader's own memory or imagination does the rest.