O Land, the measure of our prayers,
Hope of the world, in grief and wrong!
Be thine the blessing of the years,
The gift of faith, the crown of song.
THE UNSPEAKABLE PANG.
(FROM “A TRIP TO CUBA, 1860.”)
HO are these that sit by the long dinner-table in the forward cabin, with a most unusual lack of interest in the bill of fare? Their eyes are closed, mostly, their cheeks are pale, their lips are quite bloodless, and to every offer of good cheer, their “No, thank you,” is as faintly uttered as are marriage-vows by maiden lips. Can they be the same that, an hour ago, were so composed, so jovial, so full of dangerous defiance to the old man of the sea? The officer who carves the roast beef offers at the same time a slice of fat; this is too much; a panic runs through the ranks, and the rout is instantaneous and complete....
To what but to Dante’s Inferno can we liken this steamboat-cabin, with its double row of pits, and its dismal captives? What are those sighs, groans, and despairing noises, but the alti guai rehearsed by the poet? Its fiends are the stewards who rouse us from our perpetual torpor with offers of food and praises of shadowy banquets,—“Nice mutton-chop, sir? roast-turkey? plate of soup?” Cries, of “No, no!” resound, and the wretched turn again and groan. The philanthropist has lost the movement of the age,—keeled up in an upper [♦]berth, convulsively embracing a blanket—what conservative more immovable than he? The great man of the party refrains from his large theories, which, like the circles made by the stone thrown into the water, begin somewhere and end nowhere. As we have said, he expounds himself no more, the significant forefinger is down, the eye no longer imprisons yours. But if you ask him how he does, he shakes himself as if like Farinata—