That voyage is one of the most delightful memories of my life. I loved the sea; and every phase of it, storm or calm, was a new joy. I had one fellow-passenger, a German doctor of philosophy, Dr. Seemann, who had been an ardent radical in Germany, and had been studying in the United States the development of political intelligence under democratic conditions, returning to his native land with the profound conviction that democratic government was destined to be a failure. We had hot debates on the subject, in which the doctor adduced his conversations with the intelligent farmers of New England, whom he had especially studied, to show that their political education was such as to endanger the best interests of the community from its extreme superficiality; I, with an unfaltering faith in the processes of universal suffrage, disputed his conclusions, so hotly in fact that we quarreled and he took one side of the quarter-deck for his promenades and I the other. But the conditions of sea life, with a companionship limited to two persons, are such that no quarrel that was not mortal, or from rivalry in the affections of a woman, could endure many days, and after a few such days we drew to the same side of the deck and were better friends than before, but we dropped politics. This was in January of 1850, and I am driven to curiosity as to the subsequent career of the young German savant, who in that state of American political evolution was capable of drawing the horoscope of a nation, as it has been in recent times fulfilled; who saw in the crude notions of political economy of that prosperous yesterday the germs of the political blunders and errors of to-day. I drew his portrait, I made a few studies of sea and sky, but for the most part the sensation of simple existence under the conditions of illimitable freedom in space, with no reminder of anything beyond, was sufficient for me. I used to lie on my back on the roof of the wheel-house and look into the sky, and try to make friends with the sea-gulls which sailed around over me, curiously peering down with their dove-like eyes as if to see what this thing might be. Then the nights, so luminous with the "breeming" of the sea as we got into the Gulf Stream, and the flitting and sudden population of the ocean, always bringing us surprises; the more exciting and delightful storms which came on us in the region in which they were always to be expected, and which, though we had some that made lying in one's berth difficult, were never enough to satisfy my desire for rough weather,--all these things filled my life so full of the pure delight in nature that when, at the end of nearly three weeks at sea, we came in sight of the Irish coast, I hated the land. Life was enough under the sea conditions, and the prospect of the return to the limitations of living amongst men was absolute pain.