victory. What is eloquence but mass in motion,--a flood, a
cataract, an express train, a cavalry charge? We are literally
carried away, swept from our feet, and recover our senses again as
best we can.

I experienced the same emotion when I saw them go by with the
sunken steamer. The procession moved slowly and solemnly. It was
like a funeral cortege,--a long line of grim floats and barges and
boxes, with their bowed and solemn derricks, the pall-bearers; and
underneath in her watery grave, where she had been for six months,
the sunken steamer, partially lifted and borne along. Next day the
procession went back again, and the spectacle was still more
eloquent. The steamer had been taken to the flats above and raised
till her walking-beam was out of water; her bell also was exposed
and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers' Herculean labor seemed
nearly over. But that night the winds and the storms held high
carnival. It looked like preconcerted action on the part of tide,
tempest, and rain to defeat these wreckers, for the elements all
pulled together and pulled till cables and hawser snapped like
threads. Back the procession started, anchors were dragged or
lost, immense new cables were quickly taken ashore and fastened to
trees; but no use: trees were upturned, the cables stretched till
they grew small and sang like harp-strings, then parted; back, back
against the desperate efforts of the men, till within a few feet of
her old grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft,
floats were overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers
were snapped like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the
air, the steamer plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of
water.