Another pulse—and down it rushed, an avalanche of brine!
Brief pause had I on God to cry, or think of wife and home;
The waters closed, and when I shrieked, I shrieked below the foam!”
After battling with the water, and half insensible, he finds himself at last safely on board a strange vessel; a terrible face haunts him—black, grimly black, all black, except the grinning teeth. The sooty crew were like their master. “Where am I? in what dreadful ship?” cried he, in terrified agony. The answer was a laugh that rang from stem to stern from the gloomy shapes that flitted round. They guffawed and grinned and choked to the top of their bent—
“And then the chief made answer for the whole:—
‘Our skins,’ said he ‘are black, because we carry coal.
You’ll find your mother, sure enough, and see your native fields,
For this here ship has picked you up—the Mary Anne of Shields.’”
The transition from the really powerful and dramatic description of the billows and surf to the ridiculous dénouement is irresistibly and artistically comic. Hood’s purely amusing pieces are more generally known than the above. Take as an example “Faithless Sally Brown;” the girl who so soon forgot her first Ben is modelled on Dibdinian lines, but the touches of humour are infinitely more delicate.
The popularity of a class of sea-songs which can now be heard from the streets to [pg 304]the drawing-room, and from the fo’castle to the ward-room, is creditable to our age. Some of these productions, in which noble sentiments, expressed in simple and feeling words, are wedded to effective and artistic music, help to keep alive humanity, love, and honour in the rising generation. “The poor old slave is free” directly he climbs the British ship; “the sailor’s wife the sailor’s star should be,” and usually is; while the story of the poor little wounded “midshipmite” is as touching in its way as the boy who would not leave the burning deck.