principally from glowing poetical descriptions of marine sunsets, of
"summer isles of Eden, lying in dark purple spheres of sea," and of
those "moonlight nights on lonely waters" with which poets have for
ages beguiled ignorant landsmen into ocean voyages. Fogs, storms,
and seasickness did not enter at all into my conceptions of marine
phenomena; or if I did admit the possibility of a storm, it was only
as a picturesque, highly poetical manifestation of wind and water in
action, without any of the disagreeable features which attend those
elements under more prosaic circumstances. I had, it is true,
experienced a little rough weather on my voyage to California, but my
memory had long since idealised it into something grand and poetical;
and I looked forward even to a storm on the Pacific as an experience
not only pleasant, but highly desirable. The illusion was very
pleasant while it lasted; but--it is over. Ten days of real sea life
have converted the "bright uncertainty of future joys" into a dark
and decided certainty of future misery, and left me to mourn the
incompatibility of poetry and truth. Burton is a humbug, Tennyson a
fraud, I'm a victim, and Byron and Procter are accessories before the
fact. Never again will I pin my faith to poets. They may tell the
truth nearly enough for poetical consistency, but their judgment is
hopelessly perverted, and their imagination is too luxuriantly vivid
for a truthful realistic delineation of sea life. Byron's _London
Packet_ is a brilliant exception, but I remember no other in the whole
range of poetical literature.

Our life since we left port has certainly been anything but poetical.

For nearly a week, we suffered all the indescribable miseries of
seasickness, without any alleviating circumstances whatever. Day after
day we lay in our narrow berths, too sick to read, too unhappy to