Ships in dire distress at sea, yet saved by God's mercy, and the cool, invincible courage of captain and crew—great ships run ashore—the waves breaking them up—the rigging black with the despairing crew, eying the watery death that tumbled and gaped and roared for them below; and then little shore boats, manned by daring hearts, launched into the surf, and going out to the great ship and her peril, risking more life for the chance of saving life. And he did not present the bare skeletons of daring acts; those grand morgues, the journals, do that. There lie the dry bones of giant epics waiting Genius's hand to make them live. He gave them not only the broad outward facts—the bones; but those smaller touches that are the body and soul of a story, true or false, wanting which the deeds of heroes sound an almanac; above all, he gave them glimpses, not only of what men acted, but what they felt: what passed in the hearts of men perishing at sea, in sight of land, houses, fires on the hearth, and outstretched hands, and in the hearts of the heroes that ran their boats into the surf and Death's maw to save them, and of the lookers on, admiring, fearing, shivering, glowing, and of the women that sobbed and prayed ashore with their backs to the sea, just able to risk lover, husband, and son for the honor of manhood and the love of Christ, but not able to look on at their own flesh and blood diving so deep, and lost so long in cockle-shells between the hills of waves.
Such great acts, great feelings, great perils, and the gushes that crowned all of holy triumph when the boats came in with the dripping and saved, and man for a moment looked greater than the sea and the wind and death, this seaman poured hot from his own manly heart into quick and womanly bosoms, that heaved visibly, and glowed with admiring sympathy, and fluttered with gentle fear.
And after a while, though not at first, David's yarns began to contain a double interest to one of the party—Miss Fountain. Those who live to please get to read character at sight, and David, though in these more noble histories he scarcely named himself, was laying a full-length picture of his own mind bare to these keen feminine eyes. As for old Fountain, he was charmed, and saw nothing more than David showed him outright. But the women sat flashing secret intelligence backward and forward from eye to eye after the manner of their sex.
“Do you see?” said one lady's eyes.
“Yes,” replied the other. “He was concerned in this feat, though he does not say so.”
“Oh, you agree with me? Then we are right,” replied the first pair of speakers.
“There again: look; this sailor, whom he describes as a fellow that happened to be ashore at that foreign port with nothing better to do, and who went out with the English smugglers to save the brig when the natives durst not launch a boat?”
“Himself! not a doubt of it.”
And so the blue and hazel lightning went dancing to and fro; ay, even when the tale took a sorrowful turn, and dimmed these bright orbs of intelligence, the lightning struggled through the dew, and David was read and discussed by gleams, and glances, and flashes, without a word spoken. And he, all unconscious that he sat between a pair of telegraphs, and heating more and more under his great recollections and his hearers' sympathy, inthralled them with his tuneful voice, his glowing face, his lion eye, and his breathing, burning histories. Heart to dare and do, yet heart to feel, and brain and tongue to tell a deed well, are rare allies, yet here they met.
He mastered his hearers, and played on their breasts as David played the harp, and perhaps Achilles; Bochsa never, nor any of his tribe. He made the old man forget his genealogies, his small ambition, his gout, his years, and be a boy again an hour or two in thought, and blood, and early fire. He made the women's bosoms pant and swell, and seem to aspire to be the nests and cradles of heroes, and their eyes flash and glisten, and their cheeks flush and grow pale by turns; and the four little papered walls that confined them seemed to fall without noise, and they were away in thought out of a carpeted temple of wax, small talk, nonentity, and nonentities, away to sea-breezes that they almost felt in their hair and round their temples as their hearts rose and fell upon a broad swell of passion, perils, waves, male men, realities. The spell was at its height, when the sea-wizard's eye fell on the mantel-piece. Died in a moment his noble ardor: “Why, it is eight bells,” said he, servilely; then, doggedly, “time to turn in.”