We Americans Are The Peculiar, Chosen People

How Feeble Is All Language To Describe The Horrors We Inflict Upon These Wretches, Whom We Mason Up In The Cells Of Our Prisons, And Condemn To Perpetual Solitude In The Very Heart Of Our Population.

Why Is Almost Every Robust Healthy Boy With A Robust Healthy Soul In Him, At Some Time Or Other Crazy To Go To Sea? Why Upon Your First Voyage As A Passenger, Did You Yourself Feel Such A Mystical Vibration, When First Told That You And Your Ship Were Now Out Of Sight Of Land? Why Did The Old Persians Hold The Sea Holy? Why Did The Greeks Give It A Separate Deity, And Own Brother Of Jove? Surely All This Is Not Without Meaning.

Surely No Mere Mortal Who Has At All Gone Down Into Himself Will Ever Pretend That His Slightest Thought Or Act Solely Originates In His Own Defined Identity.

Know, Thou, That The Lines That Live Are Turned Out Of A Furrowed Brow.

There Is One Knows Not What Sweet Mystery About This Sea, Whose Gently Awful Stirrings Seem To Speak Of Some Hidden Soul Beneath.