Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/500

 moving through the thick vapors, and their solemn foot-fall broke the worse than Arctic stillness. I reached Washington Street, and walked anxiously westward. A news-boy passed me. I seized a paper, and the first thing which caught my eye was the account of the Ball's Bluff battle, in which had fallen many of the noblest sons of Boston; and it seemed as if the very air had shrouded itself in mourning for them, and that the heavens wept tears for the city's slain.

I was wending my way to the house of a friend, but I thought it likely that he was not there. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and yet every object which I passed was familiar. Friends, country, every thing seemed swallowed up in some vast calamity, and, doubtful and irresolute, I turned back sad and dejected, and found my way on board again through the dull, dull fog.

The terrible reality was now for the first time present to my imagination. The land which I had left in the happy enjoyment of peace and repose was already drenched with blood; a great convulsion had come to scatter the old landmarks of the national Union, and the country which I had known before could be the same no more. Mingled with these reflections were thoughts of my own career. To abandon my pursuits; to give up a project in which I had expended so much time and means; to have nipped, as it were, in the very bud, a work upon which I had set my heart, and to which I had already given all the early years of my manhood; to sacrifice all the hopes and all the ambitions which had encouraged me through toil and danger, with the promise of the fame to follow the successful completion of a great object; to abandon an