e virtues and splendid transgressions. A great
ship! For ages had the ocean battered in vain her enduring sides; she
was there when the world was vaster and darker, when the sea was great
and mysterious, and ready to surrender the prize of fame to audacious
men. A ship mother of fleets and nations! The great flagship of the
race; stronger than the storms! and anchored in the open sea.

The Narcissus, heeling over to off-shore gusts, rounded the South
Foreland, passed through the Downs, and, in tow, entered the river.
Shorn of the glory of her white wings, she wound obediently after the
tug through the maze of invisible channels. As she passed them the
red-painted light-vessels, swung at their moorings, seemed for an
instant to sail with great speed in the rush of tide, and the next
moment were left hopelessly behind. The big buoys on the tails of banks
slipped past her sides very low, and, dropping in her wake, tugged at
their chains like fierce watchdogs. The reach narrowed; from both sides
the land approached the ship. She went steadily up the river. On the
riverside slopes the houses appeared in groups--seemed to stream down
the declivities at a run to see her pass, and, checked by the mud of the
foreshore, crowded on the banks. Further on, the tall factory chimneys
appeared in insolent bands and watched her go by, like a straggling
crowd of slim giants, swaggering and upright under the black plummets
of smoke, cavalierly aslant. She swept round the bends; an impure breeze
shrieked a welcome between her stripped spars; and the land, closing in,
stepped between the ship and the sea.

A low cloud hung before her--a great opalescent and tremulous cloud, that
seemed to rise from the steaming brows of millions of men. Long drifts
of smoky vapours soiled it with livid trails; it throbbed to the beat
of millions of hearts, and from it came an immense and lamentable
murmur--the murmur of millions of lips praying, cursing, sighing,
jeering--the undying murmur of folly, regret, and hope exhaled by the
crowds of the anxious earth. The Narcissus entered the cloud; the
shadows deepened; on all sides there was the clang of iron, the sound
of mighty blows, shrieks, yells. Black barges drifted stealthily on the
murky stream. A mad jumble of begrimed walls loomed up vaguely in the
smoke, bewildering and mournful, like a vision of disaster. The
tugs backed and filled in the stream, to hold the ship steady at the
dock-gates; from her