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The distance was nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly.

At length he neared the wreck. He was so near that with one more of his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it, when a high, green, vast hillside of water moved on shoreward from beyond the ship. He seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone!

Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask had been broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in. Consternation was in every face. They drew him to my very feet insensible, dead.

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He was carried to the nearest house; and, no one preventing me now, I remained near him, busy while every means of restoration was tried; but he had been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous heart was stilled forever.

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There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin, — his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

When for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose hung ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of water:
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts, not so thou,
Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play;
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow, -
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

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Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; all in time

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving; - boundless, endless, and sublime —
The image of Eternity - the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like the bubbles, onward; from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers - they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror, 'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane as I do here.

-From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

OUR FLAG

When the standard of the Union is raised and waves over my head the standard which Washington planted on the ramparts of the Constitution - God forbid that I should inquire whom the people have commissioned to unfurl it and bear it up! I only ask in what manner, as an humble individual, I can best discharge my duty in defending it.

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THE OWL CRITIC

"Who stuffed that owl?" No one spoke in the shop:
The barber was busy, and he couldn't stop,

The customers, waiting their turns, were reading
The Daily, the Herald, the Post- little heeding
The young man who blurted out such a blunt question,
Not one raised a head nor made a suggestion -
And the barber kept on shaving.

"Don't you see, Mister Brown," Cried the youth with a frown, "How wrong the whole thing is,

How preposterous each wing is,

How flattened the head is, how jammed down the neck is,

In short the whole owl, what an ignorant wreck 'tis?

I make no apology,

I've learned owl-ology,

I've passed days and nights in a hundred collections,

And cannot be blinded to any defections

Arising from unskilful fingers that fail

To stuff a bird right from his beak to his tail.

Mister Brown! Mister Brown!

Do take that bird down

Or you'll soon be the laughing-stock all over town!"
And the barber kept on shaving.

"I've studied owls and other night fowls, And I tell you what I know to be true: An owl cannot roost

With his limbs so unloosed;

No owl in the world

Ever had his claws curled;

Ever had his legs slanted,

Ever had his bill canted,

Ever had his neck screwed

Into that attitude.

He can't do it, because
Tis against all bird-laws.
Anatomy teaches,
Ornithology preaches,
An owl has a toe

That can't turn out so!

I've made the white owl my study for years,

And to see such a job almost moves me to tears!
Mister Brown, I'm amazed

You should be so gone crazed

As to put up a bird

In that posture absurd!

To look at that owl really brings on a dizziness;

The man who stuffed him don't half know his business." And the barber kept on shaving.

"Examine those eyes!

I'm filled with surprise
Taxidermist should pass
Off on you such poor glass;
So unnatural they seem
They'd make Audubon scream,

And John Burroughs laugh

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