What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred — Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden m… - Herman Melville

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

The sky slides into blue, the bluffs into bloom; the rapid Mississippi expands; runs sparkling and gurgling, all over in eddies; one magnified wake of a seventy-four. The sun comes out, a golden huzzar, from his tent, flashing his helm on the world. All things, warmed in the landscape, leap. Speeds the daedal boat as a dream.

For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; — nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.