Quitting her fairly of the injurious sea,2
had entered the smooth waters of that stately river, and was gliding
Into the bosom of her quiet quay;2
he felt that the delight of setting foot on shore after a sea voyage, and that too the shore of a foreign country, for the first time, is one of the few pleasures which exceed any expectation that can be formed of them.
1 B. JONSON, v. 8, p. 37.
2 QUARLES.
He used to speak of his landing, on a fine autumnal noon, in the well-wooded and well-watered city of Rotterdam, and of his journey along what he called the high-turnpike canal from thence to Leyden, as some of the pleasantest recollections of his life. Nothing he said was wanting to his enjoyment, but that there should have been some one to have partaken it with him in an equal degree. But the feeling that he was alone in a foreign land sate lightly on him, and did not continue long,—young as he was, with life and hope before him, healthful of body and of mind, cheerful as the natural consequence of that health corporeal and mental, and having always much to notice and enough to do—the one being an indispensable condition of happiness, the other a source of pleasure as long as it lasts; and where there is a quick eye and an enquiring mind, the longest residence abroad is hardly long enough to exhaust it.
No day in Daniel's life had ever passed in such constant and pleasurable excitement as that on which he made his passage from Rotterdam to Leyden, and took possession of the lodgings which Peter Hopkins's correspondent had engaged for him. His reception was such as instantly to make him feel that he was placed with worthy people. The little apprehensions, rather than anxieties, which the novelty of his situation occasioned, the sight of strange faces with which he was to be domesticated, and the sound of a strange language, to which, harsh and uninviting as it seemed, his ear and speech must learn to accustom themselves, did not disquiet his first night's rest. And having fallen asleep notwithstanding the new position to which a Dutch bolster constrained him, he was not disturbed by the storks,
all night
Beating the air with their obstreperous beaks,
(for with Ben Jonson's leave, this may much more appropriately be said of them than of the ravens) nor by the watchmen's rappers, or clap-sticks, which seem to have been invented in emulous imitation of the stork's instrumental performance.