The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by Ticknor and Fields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.
Dear Mr. Editor,—The name of your magazine shall not deter me from sending you my slight reflections But you have been across, and will agree with me that it is the great misfortune of this earth that so much salt-water is still lying around between its various countries. The steam-condenser is supposed to diminish its bulk by shortening the transit from one point to another; but a delicate conscience must aver that there is a good deal left. The ocean is chiefly remarkable as the element out of which the dry land came. It is only when the land and sea combine to frame the mighty coast-line of a continent, and to fringe it with weed which the tide uncovers twice a day, that the mind is saluted with health and beauty. The fine instinct of Mr. Thoreau furnished him with a truth, without the trouble of a single game at pitch and toss with the mysterious element; for he says,—
The middle sea contains no crimson dulse, Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view, Along the shore my hand is on its pulse, And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew.
On the broad Atlantic there is no smell of the sea. That comes from the brown rocks whence iodine is exhaled to brace the nerves and the fancy, while summer woods chasten all the air. At best, the ocean is austere and unsympathetic; and a sensible, that is, a sensitive, stomach understands it to be demoralized by the monstrous krakens which are viciously brooding in its depths. (If the pronoun it, in the last sentence, should refer to stomach, the sense will still be clear.) In fact, this water has been left over from the making of the earth: like the Dodo and the Moa, it should have evaporated. How pleasant it is to be assured by Sir Charles Lyell that the land is still rising in so many quarters of the globe! for we may anticipate that millennial epoch when there shall be no more sea.