of his childhood?

I said, that at sea all is vacancy; I should correct the
impression. To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing
himself in reveries, a sea voyage is full of subjects for
meditation; but then they are the wonders of the deep and of the
air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes. I
delighted to loll over the quarter-railing or climb to the
main-top, of a calm day, and muse for hours together on the
tranquil bosom of a summer's sea; to gaze upon the piles of
golden clouds just peering above the horizon, fancy them some
fairy realms, and people them with a creation of my own; --to
watch the gently undulating billows rolling their silver volumes,
as if to die away on those happy shores.

There was a delicious sensation of mingled security and awe with
which I looked down, from my giddy height, on the monsters of the
deep at their uncouth gambols: shoals of porpoises tumbling about
the bow of the ship; the grampus, slowly heaving his huge form
above the surface; or the ravenous shark, darting, like a
spectre, through the blue waters. My imagination would conjure up
all that I had heard or read of the watery world beneath me; of
the finny herds that roam its fathomless valleys; of the
shapeless monsters that lurk among the very foundations of the
earth; and of those wild phantasms that swell the tales of
fishermen and sailors.

Sometimes a distant sail, gliding along the edge of the ocean,
would be another theme of idle speculation. How interesting this
fragment of a world, hastening to rejoin the great mass of