O one can contemplate a long sea voyage to distant lands a he to the ocean, and only glancing at its terrors, through a dim and often distorted medium, a journey over its troublous bosom is trebly fearful. Pluck up what courage may, yet the heart will quail when the hour approaches, in which to sever connection with the stable earth. Upon this merry May morning, as we are preparing to board our steamer, there is a sort of "fearful looking for" the terrors of the deep. This is entirely unnecessary, at least for the first three hours. Yet I would not be deprived of this semi-melancholy and this semi-terror which enshroud the mind before a long sea voyage. Madame de Stael has remarked, very truthfully, that it is a great trial to leave one's country, when one must cross the sea. There is such solemnity in a pilgrimage, the first steps of which are on the ocean. It seems as if a gulf were opening behind you, and your return becoming impossible. How can it be otherwise to us western folk, whose visions have been circumscribed by hills and forests, rivers and plains? The round "dim inane" of the ocean horizon already, to the mind's eye, fills the imagination with the terror which springs from vagueness. In such a stretch of the sight, not only the eye, but thought even is lost. Suggestions, connate with those which the idea of death prompts, arise in the soul. And yet, for all these imaginary as well as real experiences of ill, what a compensation has the traveller, in the anticipation of standing upon the shores of the old world, with its scenes of renowned enchantment and heroic deeds, with its very dust golden with historic memory! It is well to be shut out, as if by a wall of brass, from old and familiar things, to enjoy such hallowed and hallowing scenes. Severed from familiar objects by an abyss of water, more formidable than brass, it will be mine to transcribe the observations and thoughts which these scenes inspire. The contrasts which a sea voyage present are not unworthy of some note, especially as we have not the opportunity, as yet, to tread in the path of antiquity-to gather moss from its ruined monuments and crumbling towers-to forget the ordinary experiences of every-day life, and to wrap ourselves in the shadowy mantle of the past. We left the dock at Jersey City upon a fine day. The sun shone mildly. A light breeze, which had not power to curl a single snow-wreath, played in the harbor. All aboard. The deck was thronged with passengers and their friends to bid them " good bye." The boat is cleared of all save the passengers, and we move out, how proudly, from our mooring. The crowd on the dock cheer us; our guns answer with a quiver and a report. Away we dash-past the Battery and down the bay! A few tears from the ladies; a few farewell wavings of handkerchiefs, and New-York begins to die away in the distance. The Battery becomes an indistinct clump of foliage. The forest of masts becomes pencilled so fine as to seem but one mark; the land soon fades into a blue sky, and we are afloat ! For the first few hours the fresh air of the salt sea and the novel situation, afford agreeable excitement. The frame quivers with a new-born delight. The soul sweeps the horizon with a larger circuit and a bolder wing. The Old World already looms up in the East, a glorious promise to the Eye of Hope! Soon we hail a vessel, and let off the pilot. The little boat drops astern, amid the foam of our wake, and the steamer again throbs on its way. We had not gone far before a singular phenomena singular at least to our Buckeye eye-appeared. There was a something spouting salt water against the sky! It proved to be a whale-a live Jonah-swallowing king of the deep! We lingered upon deck to watch the sun sink in splendor. The process of setting sail began, with the cheery songs and cries of the sailors. A west wind is coming along to add to our velocity and give exhilaration to our spirits. Exhilaration? If you could only have seen your newfledged traveller, from that time forward up to the time when he first seized this pen, you would have found him a perfect embodiment of inverted exhilaration. He began to experience all the seven-fold horror of the sea. Oh! this rolling, rolling, straining, creaking, pitching, and tossing! all day—all night. When will this voyage end? He begins to count the hours, and measures them by groans. Eating? Horrible! All that he can do is to take down beef-tea, porridges and soups, and such other watery aliment, only fit for the spectre of Melancholy. Old Burton must have been upon the sea, when he wrote the couplet : "All other griefs to this are jolly, "Have any thing to-day, Sir," says our excellent servant John:"No!" is the unmannerly retort. Imprisonment in the meanest county jail, on bread and water, with whippings hourly, would be heaven to this. And then the idea of coming back. I lay whole days thinking of it-wondering if there could not be found some short-cut over Bering's straits. No matter for bad roads and cold weather, so it is mother earth-give us EARTH, Zealand or Greenland. Only let this heaving instability cease. Washington Irving never said a truer, yet in some respects a less true thing, than when he called the Ocean a blank page, separating two worlds. It may be blank; but like the pages between the Old and New Testaments, it affords a resting-place for the mind, wherein to contemplate the wonders and majesty of the Creator. It affords, too, a space for the solemn records of "Deaths," and sometimes of "Births," of which latter, our good ship received an addition when three days out. But to my thinking, this page is written all along significantly. I do not mean to say that I have been gazing out into the ocean, drinking in its roar and its sublimity; though I confess to drinking, in certain peculiar moments, divers quantities of the beverage it affords slightly warmed. To come home to our subject, I have been a victim, by no means a solitary one, to the god of the Trident. I will not say, that he has used me peculiarly unkind; for daily, since my body assumed its perpendicularity, have I seen others coming from their berths,— pictures of Spencer's Image of Despair, or rather, resembling rats emergent from holes into which young Nimrods had been pouring warm water. For over a week has my poor system experienced what never before it experienced, and (how I fear!) may again experience. But this is a part of the royal game of travel. It is this experience which is written in illuminated characters all over Irving's blank page. I would advise every one who thinks of crossing the sea, to provide a cast-iron stomach; or else procure some preparation, by which that sensitive part of our organism may be rendered ex tempore insensible. I am aware that there is, on land, some strong prejudices against sea-travelling, on account of sea-sickness. I had some misgivings myself. They fell so far short, however, of the reality, as to work great injustice to the power of Old Neptune. I would not undertake to tell precisely the treatment which Dr. Atlantic prescribed. The day after I came aboard, I inadvertently caught him assuming the office of Esculapius, taking a diagnosis of my case, and pressing home the remedy with a summariness not exceeded by the sharpest practice of another learned profession. The unremitting vigilance and care of my "big medicine-man" cannot, in my present state, be too highly lauded. That he has suffered me to sleep-a little, almost suffuses my eyes with gratitude. Dr. Sangrado prescribed a remedy for all diseases, so simple as to have become classicalblood-letting and warm water. Our Doctor disdains the former. The latter, I am pleased to say, has been adopted in these latitudes (with an addition of the saline), with good effect. The fact that I am able to write on this eighth day out, is evidence, Clear as a fountain in July, that a searching potency has been exercised, which places Mediupon the topmost sparkle of the wave of science. cine A person after emerging from the Hades of sea-sickness, is for ever after a privileged community in himself. He has certain irrepealable franchises, among which are freedom of speech, I wish I could say "free soil." FREE SOIL! I am a great freesoiler, just now. Give me soil, that is all I ask, whether it be the veriest rock upon which a lichen would starve, let it be stable-only still-rocky, but not rocking. No one can appreciate the merits of that much-abused party who has not been sea-sick. You might as well attempt to master the Integral Calculus, without a knowledge of algebra, or to read Shakspeare without a knowledge of the alphabet. It is a sine qui non. Each par |