At Rotterdam we see what the Londoner misses by having a river that
is navigable in the larger sense only below his city. To see shipping
at home we must make our tortuous way to the Pool; Rotterdam has the
Pool in her midst. Great ships pass up and down all day. The Thames,
once its bustling mercantile life is cut short by London Bridge,
dwindles to a stream of pleasure; the Maas becomes the Rhine.

Walt Whitman is the only writer who has done justice to a great
harbour, and he only by that sheer force of enumeration which in this
connection rather stands for than is poetry. As a matter of fact it
is the reader of such an inventory as we find in "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry" that is the poet: Whitman is only the machinery. Whitman gives
the suggestion and the reader's own memory or imagination does the
rest. Many of the lines might as easily have been written of Rotterdam
as of Brooklyn:--


The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender
serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their
pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of
the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the
frolicsome crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the grey walls of
the granite storehouses by the docks,