Chapter 50

HARRY BOLTON AT SEA

As yet I have said nothing about how my friend, Harry, got along as a
sailor.

Poor Harry! a feeling of sadness, never to be comforted, comes over me,
even now when I think of you. For this voyage that you went, but carried
you part of the way to that ocean grave, which has buried you up with
your secrets, and whither no mourning pilgrimage can be made.

But why this gloom at the thought of the dead? And why should we not be
glad? Is it, that we ever think of them as departed from all joy? Is it,
that we believe that indeed they are dead? They revisit us not, the
departed; their voices no more ring in the air; summer may come, but it
is winter with them; and even in our own limbs we feel not the sap that
every spring renews the green life of the trees.

But Harry! you live over again, as I recall your image before me. I see
you, plain and palpable as in life; and can make your existence obvious
to others. Is he, then, dead, of whom this may be said?

But Harry! you are mixed with a thousand strange forms, the centaurs of
fancy; half real and human, half wild and grotesque. Divine imaginings,
like gods, come down to the groves of our Thessalies, and there, in the
embrace of wild, dryad reminiscences, beget the beings that astonish the
world.

But Harry! though your image now roams in my Thessaly groves, it is the
same as of old; and among the droves of mixed beings and centaurs, you
show like a zebra, banding with elks.

And indeed, in his striped Guernsey frock, dark glossy skin and hair,
Harry Bolton, mingling with the Highlander's crew, looked not unlike the
soft, silken quadruped-creole, that, pursued by wild Bushmen, bounds
through Caffrarian woods.

How they hunted you, Harry, my zebra! those ocean barbarians, those
unimpressible, uncivilized sailors of ours! How they pursued you from
bowsprit to mainmast, and started you out of your every retreat!

Before the day of our sailing, it was known to the seamen that the
girlish youth, whom they daily saw near the sign of the Clipper in
Union-street, would form one of their homeward-bound crew. Accordingly,
they cast upon him many a critical glance; but were not long in
concluding that Harry would prove no very great accession to their
strength; that the hoist of so tender an arm would not tell many
hundred-weight on the maintop-sail halyards. Therefore they disliked him
before they became acquainted with him; and such dislikes, as every one
knows, are the most inveterate, and liable to increase. But even sailors
are not blind to the sacredness that hallows a stranger; and for a time,
abstaining from rudeness, they only maintained toward my friend a cold
and unsympathizing civility.