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Above them, in the vault of heaven, hung the Great Ship, blazed the Southern Cross. Every hour saw the flight of meteors, and their trains, golden argosies of the sky, faded slowly from the dark-blue depths. When the moon arose she was ringed with colors, but the men who gazed upon her said not, "Every hue of the rainbow is there." They said, "See the red gold, the pearls and the emeralds!"
Then, seating herself upon a bench against the wall hard by, she said: "The case is this: If a certain merchant borrow a large sum from a Jew in expectation of the speedy arrival of a certain argosy of great treasure, and if the merchant give his bond for the sum, the penalty of the bond being one pound of flesh from the body of the merchant, and if then the argosies founder and the bond be forfeit, may the Jew recover the pound of flesh and cut it from the body of the merchant?"
It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argosies of Venetian commerce with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from the wars.
Here we are tempted to stop and quote the remarkable prediction from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," the truth of which is now being so strikingly verified: "For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm; Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the parliament of man, the federation of the world."
The interpreters may blunder, but truths are immutable, eternal, and never in conflict. Remote utility is quite as worthy to be thought of as immediate advantage. Those ventures are not always most sagacious that expect a return on the morrow. It sometimes pays to send our argosies across the seas, to make investments with an eye to slow but sure returns.
It lays its gentle touch on the waterfall, transforming it into a torrent of molten silver, and causing each drop to glisten like topaz under its witching light. Overhead fleecy clouds, like white-winged argosies, sail high amid the blue, or, finer spun, like a lady's veil, are drawn, gauzelike, across the sky, through which the stars peep out with twinkling brilliancy.
Besides, the weather was perfect: argosies of fleecy cloud sailing slowly across a deep blue sky; a broad plain in all its spring freshness of color, picked out here and there with fruit trees smothered in blossom, and bearing on its bosom the passing shadows of the clouds above; in the distance the gradually growing forms of the mountains, each at first starting into life only as a faint wash of color, barely to be parted from the sky itself, pricking up from out the horizon of field.
"I am contented by remembrances Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times, Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies Which, bent on traffic in the Isles of Love, Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof, Encradled by eternal silences."
It is no longer in our power to persuade, or to command, as of old; and our canals begin to be encumbered with slimy weeds, instead of well freighted argosies and swift-sailing feluccas." "The Portuguese hath done us irretrievable harm, for without his African discoveries we might yet have retained the traffic in Indian commodities.
Their verdant banks have sheltered and protected him; their skies have smiled upon his crops. With grateful memories, therefore, is clothed for us the sound of such river names as Thames, Danube, Hudson, Mississippi. Through the centuries their kindly waters have borne down ancestral argosies of profit without number, establishing thus the wealth and happiness of the people.
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