At sea

Well! here we are four days out at sea and running along delightfully: everything augurs a charming passage & my good luck attends me, now as ever. So my friends, & brothers did not see fit to accompany me to the Hook ¹ & I did not wish they should, on my account, incur the gêne ² of returning. Yet had the case been reversed with most of them, I think my stoical self would have acted differently. Poor M ^rs Clarke & pretty M ^rs Pell ³ reluctantly compelled, for want of a cavalier, to content themselves with bidding Alfred ⁴ adieu! at the wharf. But one of the passengers had any friends to attend him to the ship: that one is an active politician of the 5^th Ward, ⁵ & was cheered off by a squadron of his warmhearted, land handed associates. It is curious how very, very sad I felt the first 48 hours after leaving New York. It is curious, because my absence is to be of so short duration; my relations, I live apart from, & therefore shall not feel my absence from: the weather was delightful, which always exhilarates me, & it is a long time since I remember to have experienced a sensation of this sort, that I could not, by an effort, shake off. Can it bode evil? I trust not, & certainly fear no such result. A firm believer in pre-ordination, & conscious of my inability to vary my fate, I am sanguine, always, in hoping for the best; &, as I believe, quite prepared for the worst. The last time I remember to have felt such sadness as I speak of, was when I went to school at Jamaica: ⁶ how well I recollect when I was first left there, that for months I cried as if my heart would break: & when my father favored us with an occasional visit, & marked the well rolled gravelled walks of old M ^r King, with the track of his solitary coach wheel; how, after his absence, I used to watch from day to day, almost with affection its gradually disappearing trace, & well nigh quarrel with M ^r King's careful gardener for obliterating what may be associated, in my mind, with such fond recollections. But a time to such childish recollections. What stuff they would seem to the eye of any other but myself.