Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/586

578 All day I drink of the wine and deep

In its stainless waves my senses steep;

All night my peaceful soul lies drowned

In hollows of the cup profound;

Again each morn I clamber up

The emerald crater of the cup,

On massive knobs of jasper stand

And view the azure ring expand:

I watch the foam-wreaths toss and swim

In the wine that o'erruns the jewelled rim,

Edges of chrysolite emerge,

Dawn-tinted, from the misty surge;

My thrilled, uncovered front I lave,

My eager senses kiss the wave,

And drain, with its viewless draught, the lore

That warmeth the bosom's secret core,

And the fire that maddens the poet's brain

With wild sweet ardor and heavenly pain.

calling has something of a special dialect. Even where there is, one would think, no necessity for it, as in the conversation of Sophomores, sporting men, and reporters for the press, a dialect is forthwith partly invented, partly suffered to grow, and the sturdy stem of original English exhibits a new crop of parasitic weeds which often partake of the nature of fungi and betoken the decay of the trunk whence they spring.

Is this the case with the language of the sea? Has the sea any language? or has each national tongue grafted into it the technology of the maritime calling?

The sea has its own laws,—the common and unwritten law of the forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament and statutes of Congress. The sea has its own customs, superstitions, traditions, architecture, and government; wherefore not its own language? We maintain that it has, and that this tongue, which is not enumerated by Adelung, which possesses no grammar and barely a lexicon of its own, and which is not numbered among the polyglot achievements of Mezzofanti or Burritt, has yet a right to its place among the world's languages.

Like everything else which is used at sea,—except salt-water,—its materials came from shore. As the ship is originally wrought from the live-oak forests of Florida and the pine mountains of Norway, the iron mines of England, the hemp and flax fields of Russia, so the language current upon her deck is the composite gift of all sea-loving peoples. But as all these physical elements of construction suffer a sea-change on passing into the service of Poseidon, so again the landward phrases are metamorphosed by their contact with the main. But no one set of them is allowed exclusive predominance. For the ocean is the only true, grand, federative commonwealth which has never owned a single master. The cloud-compelling Zeus might do as he pleased on land; but far