Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/324

 MARK TWAIN

but a memory of the past, already remote and much faded. But within the recollection of men still living, it was in the breast of every individual; and the farther any individual lived from salt-water the more of it he kept in stock. It was as pervasive, as universal, as the atmosphere itself. The mere men tion of the sea, the romantic sea, would make any company of people sentimental and mawkish at once. The great majority of the songs that were sung by the young people of the back settlements had the melancholy wanderer for subject and his mouthings about the sea for refrain. Picnic parties paddling down a creek in a canoe when the twilight shadows were gathering always sang:

Homeward bound, homeward bound, From a foreign shore;

and this was also a favorite in the West with the passengers on stern-wheel steamboats. There w.as another :

My boat is by the shore

And my bark is on the sea, But before I go, Tom Moore, Here s a double health to thee.

And this one, also.

��O pilot, tis a fearful night, There s danger on the deep.

��And this :

��A life on the ocean wave

And a home on the rolling deep, Where the scattered waters rave

And the winds their revels keep!

�� �