'
'Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious
resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living
interest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grand
summer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are the
ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes,
standing like black fangs, half-buried in the sand. And off what are
those two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a
sickly, putrescent odour? A corpse?'
No, it was not a corpse; but the token of many corpses. A fragment
of some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gilding
contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells,
which clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and torn
and scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens.
In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months
ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? How
long had that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream,
from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on its
homeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen shore? And who were all those
living men who "went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of
heroes," to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead? And
every one of them had a father and mother--a wife, perhaps, and
children, waiting for him--at least a whole human life, childhood,
boyhood, manhood, in him.
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