humming with the faint vibration of their own
tongues, but newly resting from the ghostly preachment 'One!' The earth
covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of
dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and
fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift
clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping
after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on,
and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.

Whither go the clouds and wind so eagerly? If, like guilty spirits, they
repair to some dread conference with powers like themselves, in what
wild regions do the elements hold council, or where unbend in terrible
disport?

Here! Free from that cramped prison called the earth, and out upon the
waste of waters. Here, roaring, raging, shrieking, howling, all night
long. Hither come the sounding voices from the caverns on the coast of
that small island, sleeping, a thousand miles away, so quietly in the
midst of angry waves; and hither, to meet them, rush the blasts from
unknown desert places of the world. Here, in the fury of their unchecked
liberty, they storm and buffet with each other, until the sea, lashed
into passion like their own, leaps up, in ravings mightier than theirs,
and the whole scene is madness.

On, on, on, over the countless miles of angry space roll the long
heaving billows. Mountains and caves are here, and yet are not; for
what is now the one, is now the other; then all is but a boiling heap of
rushing water. Pursuit, and flight, and mad return of wave on wave, and
savage struggle, ending in a spouting-up of foam that whitens the
black night; incessant change of place, and form, and hue; constancy in
nothing, but eternal strife; on, on, on, they roll, and darker grows the
night, and louder howls the wind, and more clamorous and fierce become
the million voices in the sea, when the wild cry goes forth upon the
storm 'A ship!'

Onward she comes, in gallant combat with the elements, her tall masts
trembling, and her timbers starting on the strain; onward she comes, now
high upon the curling billows, now low down in the hollows of the sea,
as hiding for the moment from its fury; and every storm-voice in the air
and water cries more loudly yet, 'A ship!'

Still she comes striving on; and at her boldness and the spreading cry,
the angry waves rise up above each other's hoary heads to lo