The next morning, with all sails filled, we wafted away into the open waters of the rolling Atlantic Ocean, touching at the town of Brest, land's end port of France, and then away to Corunna in Spain, and on to Lisbon, Portugal, where we remained three days viewing the architectural and natural sights of the great commercial and shipping city of the Tagus.
About the middle of May we swung out again into the breakers of old ocean, and held our course to the wonderful "Strait of Gibraltar," separating Europe from Africa, whose inland, classic shores are bathed by the emerald waters of the romantic Mediterranean Sea.
We remained for a day at the rocky, stormy town of Gibraltar, meeting variegated men of all lands, who spoke all dialects, and preached and practiced all religions.
The pagan, the Moslem, the Buddhist, the Jew and the Christian dressed in the garb of their respective nationalities, were wrangling, trading, praying and swearing in all languages, every one grasping for the "almighty dollar."
As the sun went down over the shining shoulders of the Western Atlantic, flashing its golden rays over the moving, liquid floor of the heaving ocean and Mediterranean Sea, William and myself stood on the topmost crag of giant Gibraltar, and the Bard sent forth this impulsive sigh from his romantic soul:
How I long to roam o'er the bounding sea,
Where the waters and winds are fierce and free,
Where the wild bird sails in his tireless flight,
As the sunrise scatters the shades of night;
Where the porpoise and dolphin sport at play
In their liquid realm of green and gray.
Ah, me! It is there I would love to be
Engulfed in the tomb of eternity!
In the midnight hour when the moon hangs low
And the stars beam forth with a mystic glow;
When the mermaids float on the rolling tide
And Neptune entangles his beaming bride,—
It is there in that phosphorescent wave
I would gladly sink in an ocean grave—
To rise and fall with the songs of the sea
And live in the chant of its memory.
Around the world my form should sweep—
Part of the glorious, limitless deep;
Enmeshed by fate in some coral cave,
And rising again to the topmost wave,
That curls in beauty its snowy spray
And kisses the light of the garish day;
Ah! there let me drift when this life is o'er,
To be tossed and tumbled from shore to shore!
I clapped my hands intensely at the rendition of the poem, and echo from her rocky caves sent back the applause, while the sea gulls in their circling flight, screamed in chorus to the voice of echo and the eternal roar of old ocean.
At sunrise we sailed away into the land-locked waters of the Mediterranean Sea, where man for a million years has loved, lived, fought and died among beautiful, blooming islands that nestle on its bosom like emeralds in the crown of immortality.