Then it is grand and awful in its majesty; and when I see it so it makes me mad with a triumphant sense of power in overriding it--as it boils beneath the vessel's keel, longing to overwhelm it and me, yet impotent of evil! Whether in calm or in storm--at dawn of day, with the rosy flush of the rising sun blushing the horizon up to the zenith, or at night, with the twinkling stars shining down into its sombre depths and the recurring flashes of sheet lightning lighting up its immensity, which seems vaster as the darkness grows--it is to me always attractive, ever lovable.
In its bright buoyancy it exhilarates me; in its calm, it causes me to dream; and, in its wild moods, when heaven and sea appear to meet together in wrestling embrace, I can--if joyous at the time--almost shout aloud in ecstasy of admiring awe and kindred riot of mind; while, should I feel sad during the carnival of the elements, I get reflective, and-- "As I watch the ocean In pitiless commotion, Like the thoughts, now surging wildly through my storm-tost breast, The snow-capt, heaving billows Seem to me as lace-fring'd pillows Of the deep Deep's bed of rest!" Did you ever chance to read Chateaubriand's _Genie du Christianisme_?
It is a queer book for a Frenchman to have written, but abounding in beautiful description and startling bits of observation.

I remember, one evening on the passage out, when it was very rough, having a particular sentence of this work especially called to my mind.

It was that in which the author discourses on the Deity, and says,-- "I do not profess to be anything myself; I am only a solitary unit.
But I have often heard learned men disputing about a chief originator, or prime cause, and I have never been able to comprehend their arguments; for I have always noticed that it is at the sight of the stupendous movements of nature that the idea of this unknown supreme `origin' becomes manifested to the mind of man." This sentence was the more impressed on my memory, from the fact, that, on the very same evening, while reading the appointed portion of the Psalms out of the little Prayer-book which Min had given me--a duty that I had promised her to perform regularly every day--I came across a verse, which, in different language, expressed almost the very same thing.

It was the one wherein David exclaims, "They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters, these men see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep!" Our voyage was uneventful, beyond this one instance of rough weather-- when, throughout the night, as the steamer pitched and heaved, rolling and labouring, as if her last hour was come, the screw propeller worked round with a heavy thudding sound, as if some Cyclops were pounding away under my bunk with a broomstick to rouse me up, my cabin being just over the screw shaft.

It went for awhile "thump:--thump! thump, thump, thump! Thump:--thump! Thump, thump, thump!" with even regularity; and then would suddenly break off this movement, whizzing away at a great rate, as the "send" of the sea lifted the blades out of the water, buzzing furiously the while like some marine alarum clock running down, or the mainspring of your watch breaking! In the morning, however, only the swelling waves--that were rapidly subsiding--remained to remind us of the gale; and, from that date, we had fine weather and a good wind "a-beam," until we finally sighted Sandy Hook lightship at the foot of New York Bay.
We did this in exactly ten days from the time of our "departure point" being taken, off the Needles .-- Rather a fair run on the whole, when you consider that we lost fully a day by the storm, compelling us as it did, not only to slacken speed, but also to reverse our course, in order to keep the vessel's head to the sea, and prevent her being pooped by some gigantic following wave--as might have been the case if we had kept on before it, as the unfortunate _London_ did, a short period before.
My first impressions of "the Empire city," as the proud Manhattanese fondly style it, were, certainly, not favourable; rather the contrary, I may say at once, without any "beating about the bush." You see, I landed on a Sunday.