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He had silks, too, embroidered in gold, and needlework of Sidonian women, and all these the Queen Meriamun touched to show her acceptance of them, and smiled graciously and wearily. But the covetous Sidonian groaned, when he saw his wealth departing from him, the gains for which he had hazarded his life in unsailed seas.
Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs and beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, and of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived on the marches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun in Elizabeth's reign.
Only in some great desert, the vast stretches of unsailed seas, or the depths of uninhabited forests, were its supernal splendors unnoted.
Then, and here his voice would sink and his eyes grow large with wonder, he told Christopher how men who were explorers were certain that somewhere in that unsailed western sea, just before one came to the edge, was an island rich in gold and gems and rare, delicious fruits, where men need never work if they chose to stay there, or if they came home might bring such treasures with them as would put to shame the richest princes of all Europe.
I never thought, said Pantagruel, to have encountered with any man so headstrong in his apprehensions, or in his opinions so wilful, as I have found you to be and see you are. Nevertheless, the better to clear and extricate your doubts, let us try all courses, and leave no stone unturned nor wind unsailed by. Take good heed to what I am to say unto you.
The cool night breeze, freshening in from the vast salt wastes of the sea unsailed forever now cooled their cheeks and soothed the fever of their thoughts. Where the grim ruin of Grant's Tomb looked down upon the river, they came at length upon a strange, rude boat, another, then a third a whole flotilla, moored with plaited ropes of grass to trees along the shore.
Johnson's writings are now much less read than they deserve to be. For this there are a variety of causes. Fourteen years before he died, William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth; and fourteen years after his death Wordsworth and Coleridge published the volume which, more perhaps than any other, started English literature on its great voyage into seas unsailed and unimagined by Johnson.
We shall not be shaken By things worse than these; We have 'scaped, when our friends were taken, On the unsailed seas; Worse deaths have we faced and fled from, In the Cyclops' den, When the floor of his cave ran red from The blood of men; Worse griefs have we known undaunted, Worse fates have fled; When the Isle that our long love haunted Lay waste and dead!
It is evident that the two accounts are at variance, as the first asserts that the passage was round Cape Diab, at the termination of Africa, and the second that it was round Cape Sofala, fifteen degrees to the north of the extremity of this quarter of the world: but without attempting to reconcile this contradiction, it is abundantly evident that Mauro, by noticing the Portuguese navigators, as having reached 2000 miles to the south of Gibraltar, and adding that 2000 miles more of the coast of Africa had been explored by an Indian ship, meant to encourage the further enterprises of the Portuguese, by the natural inference that a very small space of unsailed sea must lie between the two lines, which were the limits of the navigation of the Portuguese and Indian vessel.
Yet I will add a word: "O thou for whom, if the Hesea's tale be true, I did once lay down my royal rank and dare the dangers of an unsailed sea; O thou whom in ages gone I would have sheltered with my frail body from the sorceries of this cold, self-seeking witch; O thou whom but a little while ago at my own life's risk I drew from death in yonder river, choose, choose!"
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