I cannot help some anxious feelings respecting you, nor some superstitious twitches within, as if it were wrong at this distance to write so prospectively and with such particularization of that which is contingent, which may be all otherwise. But--God forbid! and, surely, hope is less ominous than fear. We set sail from St. Helier's, April 9th, Monday morning, having dropped down thither from Spithead on Sunday evening. We lost twenty-six hours of fair wind before our commodore gave the signal--our brig, a most excellent and first-rate sailor, but laden deep with heavy goods (eighty-four large cannon for Trieste in the hold), which makes it rock most cruelly. I can only--
Wed. April 18. I was going to say I can only compare it to a wench kept at home on some gay day to nurse a fretful infant and who, having long rocked it in vain, at length rocks it in spite.... But though the rough weather and the incessant rocking does not disease me, yet the damn'd rocking depresses one inconceivably, like hiccups or itching; it is troublesome and impertinent and forces you away from your thoughts like the presence and gossip of an old aunt, or long-staying visitor, to two lovers. Oh with what envy have I gazed at our commodore, the Leviathan of seventy-four guns, the majestic and beautiful creature sailing right before us, sometimes half a mile, oftener a furlong (for we are always first), with two or at most three topsails that just bisect the naked masts--as much naked mast above as below, upright, motionless as a church with its steeple, as though it moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual, the being and essence without the body of motion, or as though the distance passed away by it and the objects of its pursuit hurried onward to it! In all other respects I cannot be better off, except perhaps the two passengers; the one a gay, worldly-minded fellow, not deficient in sense or judgment, but inert to everything except gain and eating; the other, a woman once housekeeper in General Fox's family, a creature with a horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee of flabby flesh, or rather _fish_. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and _fowl_, though no chicken. But, ... to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity talk about it! "I must have that little potato" (baked in grease under the meat), "it looks so smilingly at me." "Do cut me, if you please" (for she is so fat she cannot help herself), "that small bit, just there, sir! a leetle, tiny bit below if you please." "Well, I have brought plenty of pickles, I always think," etc. "I have always three or four jars of brandy cherries with me: for with boil'd rice now," etc., "for I always think," etc. And true enough, if it can be called thinking, she does always think upon some little damned article of eating that belongs to the housekeeper's cupboard's locker. And then her plaintive yawns, such a mixture of moan and petted child's dry _cry_, or _try_ at a cry in them. And then she said to me this morning, "How unhappy, I always think, one always is, when there is nothing and nobody as one may say, about _one_ to amuse _one_. It makes me so _nervous_." She eats, drinks, snores, and simply the being stupid, and silly, and vacant the learned body calls nervous. Shame on me for talking about her! The sun is setting so exactly behind my back that a ball from it would strike the stem of the vessel against which my back rests. But sunsets are not so beautiful, I think, at sea as on land. I am sitting at _my_ desk, namely the rudder-case, on the duck coop, the ducks quacking at my legs. The chicken and duck coops run thus [Illustration] and so inclose on three sides the rudder-case. But now immediately that the sun has sunk, the sea runs high, and the vessel begins its old trick of rocking, which it had intermitted the whole day--the second intermission only since our voyage. Oh, how glad I was to see Cape Mondego, and then yesterday the Rock of Lisbon and the fine mountains at its interior extremity, which I conceived to be Cintra! Its outline from the sea is something like this