NARRATIVE OF THE WRECK OF THE "DUNBAR."
Warning not heard or seen—no help at hand—
The wide, dark bosom of the angry deep
With irresistible and cruel force
Received them all. One only cast alive,
Fainting and breathless on the fatal rocks—
To weeping friends and strangers afterwards
Thus told his melancholy tale—
During the last few days a dark, mysterious gloom has fallen upon our beautiful city, caused by one of the most awful and heartrending calamities which has ever appealed to the feelings of our common humanity, or carried desolation and agony into the sacred precincts of domestic life. A magnificent, first-class passenger ship, under a most able and experienced commander—her cargo alone invoiced at £72,000—has been so utterly cast away within a mile or two of our very doors, that but one has been saved alive out of a crew of upwards of 120 souls—one only, as it were, to throw some faint light upon the causes of this frightful disaster. Death in its mildest form is terrible; but, accompanied with such strange and horrible circumstances as those with which so many of us are now familiar, it becomes a thing which the boldest cannot contemplate without dismay. Nothing is perhaps a more faithful reflex of the anxiety and consternation of the public mind than the vague, hurried, and contradictory manner in which our journals have given the details of this melancholy shipwreck; so different from that clear, calm tone in which they usually furnish the news of the day—facts and fictions, conjectures and repetitions, being successively laid before the reader, as if the writers themselves involuntarily participated in the universal excitement; or were wholly unequal to the task of satisfying that eager, restless craving for further information herein which appears to have seized upon all classes of society. We shall endeavour, as far as may be, to remedy this by a short resumé of the chief particulars—a narrative which will serve to give those as yet partially acquainted with this sad affair a more correct idea of what has taken place; taking care, of course, in doing so to avoid giving offence to the most fastidious delicacy, or to trespass in any way upon the sorrows of our afflicted fellow citizens, for whom we feel such a sincere but unavailing sympathy.