was called to take my seat in the bell. One of the men came
out to make room for me; but, before I entered, the crane was swung
round to the west side of the lighter, as the men reported that a more
likely field of investigation lay in that direction, where they had
observed a bright body which they took for a mass of glittering specie,
probably rolled out of the packages, and lying there from its greater
specific gravity. On mounting up into the bell, where the two remaining
workmen were refreshing themselves with brandy to recover the play of
the lungs, which, in the last descent, had suffered from a deficiency of
oxygen, I felt a creeping sensation pass over me, in spite of my efforts
to be calm and firm. This I attributed to the already excited state of
my fancy, from the long train of musings I had indulged in over the
green deep. In my ascent with the aeronaut, I experienced a sensation in
some degree similar to that feeling of lofty awe which accompanies the
expectation of the grand impulse of sublimity--[Greek: ton sphodron kai
enthousiastikon pathos]; but now the action of the heart seemed tending
towards a collapse rather than a swell: I felt already the chilling
effect of the cold element before I had descended into its womb. I
looked round me with a nervous eye, and threw the colours of my fancy on
even common objects. The dull yolks of glass placed round the sides to
give light, pale and lustreless--the iron tools, wet and brown with
rust--the black leather flasks of spirits--the big hammer used for
signals of distress--were all strange and invested with new characters;
and the two men, Jenkins, an Englishman, and Vanderhoek, a German, with
sallow countenances, rendered paler than usual by the effects of the
confined air, seemed rather to belong to the watery element from which
they had emerged, than to the fair and smiling earth. I attempted to
look unconcernedly; but the German, as he was lifting his flask to his
head, scanned me with a ludicrous gaze, and, whether it was that the
brandy had, in some degree, inclined him to a merriment that in my eyes
seemed like the grin of a demon, or that he wished to let me hear the
_ringing_ sound of the bell when the human voice echoed within it, I
know not; but he accompanied his potations with a stanza of Burger's
famous Zechlied:--

"Ich will einst, bei ja und nein
Vor dem Zapfen sterben
Alles, meinen Wein nur nicht
Lass' Ich frohen erben."

A