With the breath of morn and the soft sea air.
Like a beauteous barge was she——
And so on. All through the poem, right up to the wedding on the ship's deck on the day of her launching, Longfellow draws the analogy between the shapely vessel, the bride of the ocean, and the fair maiden, the bride of the proud young builder.
'She is like the merchant ships!' says the ancient Eastern sage.
'Like a beauteous barge was she!' exclaims the Western poet.
It is difficult to resist the testimony of two such witnesses.
III
Neither the good wife nor the gallant ship need resent the analogy. If the good wife does not like being compared to a ship, let her sit down for five minutes and think, and it will occur to her that, of all our ingenious inventions and bewildering contrivances, a ship is the only one that has a divine origin and a divine authority. The ark was the first ship; and its plans and specifications were divinely dictated. Moreover, it is obvious that, since the Lord God divided His world into islands and continents, with vast expanses of ocean rolling between, and commanded that all those scattered territories should be peopled and developed, He contemplated the existence of the ships. The ships were part of the original programme. The ships were to be the instruments of those distributive and mediative ministries on which the history of the world was to be based.
Or, if instead of thinking abstract thoughts, the good wife prefers to read, let her reach down Rudyard Kipling's ballad of the Big Steamers.
'Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,