* * * *

Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur;
the white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and rise
again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father
and sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail
forward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet.

When will it come? It is dying back--sliding past us. 'Hope
deferred maketh the heart sick.' No, louder and nearer swells 'the
voice of many waters,' 'the countless laugh of ocean,' like the mirth
of ten thousand girls, before us, behind us, round us; and the oily
swell darkens into crisp velvet-green, till the air strikes us, and
heels us over; and leaping, plunging, thrashing our bows into the
seas, we spring away close-hauled upon the ever-freshening breeze,
while Claude is holding on by ropes and bulwarks, and some, whose
sea-legs have not yet forgot their craft, are swinging like a
pendulum as they pace the deck, enjoying, as the Norse vikings would
have called it, 'the gallop of the flying sea-horse, and the shiver
of her tawny wings.'

Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride of
the race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwart
hunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to
climb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk's nest; but not so maddening
as the new motion of our age--the rush of the express-train, when the
live iron pants and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting;
and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish; and
rocks, and grass, and bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and the
long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far