“I am alone—the wide, wide world
Holds not a heart that beats for me;
I’ve seen my brightest hopes grow dim,
As fades the twilight o’er the sea.”
That Mr. Kellogg understood this loneliness and had a large sympathy for the men “that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters,” these eloquent words of his well show: “In respect to the great mass of seamen, they neither own land, build houses, nor rear families. They neither give nor receive those sympathies and attentions which create among men a mutual dependence and attachment. When they are sick, no circle of neighbors and friends watch by their bedside and minister to their necessities, but the walls of the hospital, if on shore, receive them and conceal their sorrows from observation. No kindred follow them to the grave and erect the memorial stone. They are not, in the expressive language of Scripture, ’gathered unto their fathers,’ but they are buried on the shores of foreign lands, or amid the everlasting snows of the pole, or in the abyss of ocean, slumbering in nameless sepulchres and mausoleums of the mighty deep. Like the winds that bear and the waves that break around them, they are the visitors of every clime, the residents of none.... The knowledge of the community at large in respect to seamen is too often gleaned from the exaggerated descriptions of novelists.... Every man has in his heart home feeling. It is an old-fashioned thing. He drew it in with his mother’s milk. He learned it at his father’s knees. Even sailors are men. They did not spring from the froth of the sea, like Venus. They had mothers and fathers that loved them and prayed for them. It is the heart makes home. It is the heart makes friends in the world. The heart makes heaven.”
Sailors are ever among the bravest of the brave. Great as is the appreciation of the American people of the bravery of the men who lined up behind the guns of our warships in the great war which kept the Union whole, it is not half great enough.
Neither can we overestimate their loyalty in all great crises of the nation’s history. It was President Lincoln who pointed out the fact that in all the general defection of the first period of secession not a single common seaman proved false to his flag.
In a prayer-meeting at the Mariners’ Church while the war was in progress a landsman lamented its effect upon the “Jackies.” A man-of-war’s man arose and said: “What is war to me? What is war to my shipmates? It brings no increase of peril—only another kind. We have always faced danger and death and disease. What is it to me whether danger comes from storms or from batteries? I can kneel down between the guns and pray as well as in my room at the Sailors’ Home.”