And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy And laid my hand upon thy mane as I do here.” To this influence the New England mind seems peculiarly fitted to respond. We love the ocean and all that belongs to it. We associate with it the industry, energy and daring of those we love, and whose life has been spent in traversing its wide and fearful waste, and some of whom have found their graves in its dread abyss. The ocean is our neighbor. We look upon it daily and admire its changes, its ebbing and flowing tides. We see it bearing on its bosom the fleets of commerce and of war, and condescending to float its only unpoetical visitor, but most useful servant of man, the steamboat, that puffs its way from shore to shore with most sacrilegious defiance of Neptune and all his winds. We can hardly wonder that he sometimes takes signal vengeance on this attempt of man by his inventions to invade and subjugate his domain, to divert it of its rightful owner, to destroy its inheritance of poetry and romance, and reduce it to the dead level of the earth, with its telegraphs and its railroads. The poetry of the sea, as well as of the land, may seem likely to yield to the utilitarian spirit; but Niagara Falls are yet left to us, and the Mississippi, and, more than all, the ocean, which remains the same, pure and undefiled by all the contaminations of steam and smoke, or any of the inventions which man has sought out. The love of the sea, that natural inheritance of those who have been born upon its shores, has created a wonderful influence upon New England habits and character. It has called forth and developed the highest qualities of freedom, energy, skill, perseverance and courage, which distinguish our people, and which have nowhere been more fostered and called into requisition than in that profession to which so many of our distinguished sons have been educated. The sea, if it does not make men learned and scientific, educates its pupils to be generous, open-hearted, intelligent, benevolent, conservative, and just. It educates them to be good members of society, and ready to contribute their wealth to all that adorns and cultivates, as well as to what ameliorates and improves the conditions of their fellow-men. Of this truth no city can furnish more ample evidence than our own city of Boston. The wealth brought from the Northwest coast, from China, from Hindostan, from the Isles of the Pacific and the shores of Europe, flows in full and steady streams to enrich colleges, to endow hospitals, to build schoolhouses, to erect churches, to found asylums for the blind and homes for the sailor, to patronize the arts of painting, sculpture and music; in short, to make our city in fact, as it has long been in name, the Athens of America. THE STEAMBOAT. IF the triumphs of steam have been great on the land, changing the business habits and social relations of the world, it has effected a revolution equally wonderful in the affairs of commerce and the domains of the sea. Who, among the most sanguine, could have imagined that the little boat, making its first trip four miles an hour on the waters of the Hudson, was to be the precursor of those floating palaces that now ascend that beautiful river at the rate of fifteen or twenty miles per hour. It is the first step that costs. When the idea is struck out by the inspiration of genius and its truth demonstrated, then science steps in and mechanical invention, to improve and perfect the means of turning the new discovery to the highest use. The whole matter was contained in Fulton's boat. The whole secret of applying the expansive force of steam, as a motive power to machinery, was there, but the means of applying this new agent have been improved, multiplied and perfected, until hardly a resemblance remains between Fulton's engine and |