The storm swells loud and more loudly; but the yielding ship has risen from the first awful impression of its force and now careers furiously before it. The brailed but unfurled topsails flap with a dull and hollow thunder, as they whirl and rebound under the restraint of the clue-lines and the iron hands of the desperate crew. See that ghastly ball of purple flame leaping from spar to spar, like the visible spirit of the tempest![3]—Now it is on the foremast head,—now it glares on the bowsprit,—and again, it springs to the mainyard and flashes full in the face of you startled reefer, casting the hue of death over his boyish features, rendered clearly visible for a moment in the demon torchlight. The first flurry of the squall is passed;—we are again on a wind!—but still wave follows wave, rolling on with an angry roar;—and each in turn, as it reaches the vessel, strikes the bow with a resounding crash. Every plank in the firmly-bolted hull trembles beneath the blow, while the billow sweeps off under the lea, hissing and frothing in baffled rage to find the gallant bark invulnerable to its power.—Ever and anon the vivid lightning gilds the wide circle of a boiling sea, covered with broad streaks of foam driven onward for miles in narrow belts before the wind, while the sharp, sudden thunder follows on the instant, with a single detonation, like the discharge of an enormous cannon. Here are no hills and valleys to awake the long reverberating echoes—no solid earth to fling back the war-note of the storm in proud defiance to the clouds! The binnacle lamps are shining on a portion of the quarter-deck, and light up the form of the helmsman at the wheel. Firm and unmoved amid the elemental jar, he stands like a guardian spirit in the centre of an illuminated sphere, contrasted so strongly with the palpable darkness around, that the imponderable air itself is made to appear material and tangible. On him depends our fate. One error!—one instance of momentary neglect, and the mountain swell might overtop our oaken bulwarks, leaving us a shattered and unmanagable wreck upon the desert waste of waters! But listen!—what mean those indescribable sounds making themselves audible at intervals above the roar of the gale? Look out into the gloom, and strive to penetrate the mingled rain and spray! Do you not see from time to time, those undefined and monstrous shapes,—blacker than night itself,—rising from the deep and giving utterance to noises like the puff of a steam engine combined with the snorting of some mammoth beast? Even here, while winds and waves are raging—in this chaos of air and ocean, where the barriers of heaven and earth seem broken down, and spray and foam—the sea—the rain—the clouds—are whirled together in one wide mass of inextricable confusion—_even here_, there are beings whose joy is in the tempest, sporting their ungainly gambols—fearless of the scathing bolt and glorying in the pealing thunder!