hall attempt the like."--BURTON.

AT SEA, 700 MILES N.W. OF SAN FRANCISCO.
_Wednesday, July 12, 1865_.

Ten days ago, on the eve of our departure for the Asiatic coast, full
of high hopes and joyful anticipations of pleasure, I wrote in a fair
round hand on this opening page of my journal, the above sentence
from Burton; never once doubting, in my enthusiasm, the complete
realisation of those "future joys," which to "fancy's eye" lay in such
"bright uncertainty," or suspecting that "a life on the ocean wave"
was not a state of the highest felicity attainable on earth. The
quotation seemed to me an extremely happy one, and I mentally blessed
the quaint old Anatomist of Melancholy for providing me with a motto
at once so simple and so appropriate. Of course "he took great content
and exceeding delight in his voyage"; and the wholly unwarranted
assumption that because "he" did, every one else necessarily must, did
not strike me as being in the least absurd.

On the contrary, it carried all the weight of the severest logical
demonstration, and I would have treated with contempt any suggestion
of possible disappointment. My ideas of sea life had been derived
principally from glowing poetical descriptions of marine sunsets, of
"summer isles of Eden, lying in dark purple spheres of sea," and of
those "moonlight nights on lonely waters" with which poets have for
ages beguiled ignorant landsmen into ocean voyages. Fogs, storms,
and seasickness did not enter at all into my conceptions of marine
phenomena; or if I did admit the possibility of a storm, it was only
as a picturesque, highly poetical manifestation of wind and water in
action, without any of the disagreeable features which attend those
elements under more prosaic circumstances. I had, it is true,
experienced a little rough weather on my voyage to California, but my
memory had long since idealised it into something grand and poetical;
and I looked forward even to a storm on the Pacific as an experience
not only pleasant, but highly desirable. The illusion was very
pleasant while it lasted; but--it is over. Ten days of real sea life
have converted the "bright uncertainty of future joys" into a dark
and decided certainty of future misery, and left me to mourn the
incompatibility of poetry and truth. Burton is a humbug, Tennyson a
fraud, I'm a victim, and Byron and Procter are accessories before the
fact. Never again will I pin my faith to poets. They may tell the