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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 is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Moby Dick is not garbage, ma'am.

Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, whic he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?

Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?

Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies -- what is the one charm wanting? -- Water -- there is not a drop of water there!

But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepher'd eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.

Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.

There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.

What is the chief element he employs?

He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of Saco.

But here is an artist.

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.

Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor.

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries -- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.

There is magic in it.

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.

Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.

Once more.

Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Yet here they all unite.