or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living
fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the
unwearied enmity of ocean,--the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of
the black waves, provoking each other on, endlessly, all the infinite
march of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help,--and still
to strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its
way against them, and keep its charge of life from them;--does any other
soulless thing do as much as this?

I should not have talked of this feeling of mine about a boat, if I had
thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who
are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and
close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat
remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity
in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective
nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is
swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its
steadiness of poise--its assured standing on the clear softness of the
abyss; and, after that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as
shall be consistent with this defiance of the treachery of the sea. And,
this being understood, it is very notable how commonly the poets,
creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a
boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do,
it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or
soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to
let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to
themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a
Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and
seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in
general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a
triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of
visiting the stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";[I]
and to find Tennyson--although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a
very marshy and punt-like character--at last, in his highest
inspiration, enter in where the wind began "to sweep a music out of
sheet and shroud."[J] But the chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had
known all manner of traveling; had been borne throu