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The South-West

The South-West

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Chapter 1 No.1

Word Count: 1823    |    Released on: 06/12/2017

icide-Monotony-Wish for excitement-Superlative misery-Log-Combustible materials-Cook and buc

lood can well be placed in. A meridian sun-a cloudless sky-a sea of glass, like a vast burning reflector, giving back a twin-heaven inverted-a dry, hot air, as though exhaled from

illustrated it by a more striking figure. This is a state of which you are happily ignorant. Herein, ignorance is the height of bliss, although, should a Yankee propensity for peregrinating stimulate you to become wiser by experience, I will not say that your folly will be more apparent than your wisdom. But if you continue to vegetate in the lovely valley of your nativity, one of "New-England's yeomanry," as you are wont, not a little proudly, to term yours

a long voyage. Seeds of impatience and of indolence are there sown, which will be for a long period painfully manifest. The sweetest tempered woman I ever knew, after a passage of sixty days, was converted into a querulous Xantippe; and a gentleman of the most active habits, after a voyage of much longer duration, acquired such indolent ones, that his usefulness as a man of business was for a long time destroyed; and it was only by the strongest application of high, moral energy, emanating from a mind of no common order, that he was at length enabled wholly to be himself again. There is but one antidote for this disease, which should be nosologically classed as Melancholia Oceana, and that is

e sense" with a tiresome familiarity. Reading becomes hateful, for the very reason that it has become necessary. Amusements are exhausted, invented, changed, varied, and again exhausted. Every thing upon which the attention fixes itself, vainly wooing something novel, soon becomes insipid. Chess, back-gammon, letter-writing, journalizing, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping, may at first contribute not a little to the discomfiture of old Time, who walks the sea shod with leaden sandals. The last three enumerated

y of a circle, of which his vessel seems to be the immovable and everlasting centre-the same blue, unmeaning skies above-the same blue sea beneath and around-the same gigantic tracery of ropes and spars, whose fortuitous combinations of strange geometrical figures

ss of a sea-life will by no means afford me many combustible incidents. Somebody has said "the will is equal to the deed, if the deed cannot be." Now I have the will to pile a hecatomb, but if I can pile only a couple of straws, it will be, of course, the same thing in the abstract. Mine, perchance, may be the fate of that poor journalist who, in a voyage across the Atlantic, could obtain but one wretched item wherewith to fill his journal-which he should

as got his bucket again-and a

he common-place descriptions of sea-scenes, something, which wears the charm of novelty. If my hasty sketches can contribute to your entertain

s, carpet-bags, and all the paraphernalia of travelling equipage, had long been packed, locked, and shipped-and our eyes had hourly watched the fickle gyrations of a horizontal

assengers, as by twos and threes, they would meet by a kind of sympathetic affinity at the corners of the streets, where an unobstructed view could be obtained

n our patience to shreds by his obstinacy, let his head and heels exchange places. At the same moment, ere he had ceased vibrating and settled himself steadily in his new position, t

osts at the command of their superior officer, the active seamen soon extended them upon the spars-immense fields of swell

an was sending in its evening tribute to the continent, in vast scrolls, which rolled silently, but irresistibly onward, and majestically unfolded upon the beach

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