"Then there are other wonders in the living creatures of the deep, from the animalcule, that 'no eye can see,' and that scarcely 'glass can reach,' up to 'that Leviathan which God hath made to play therein.' In 'this great and wide sea are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.' Yet He, who hath made them all, even there openeth his hand and satisfieth the desires of all. Wonderful is it, that, of these 'creatures innumerable,' each one finds its food in some other, and in its turn, serves some other for food; and that this great work of destruction and reproduction goes on in an unbroken circle from age to age, in the deep silence of those still deeper waters where the power of man is neither felt nor feared! "What a wonder, too, is that line of phosphoric light, which, in the darkest night, streams along 'the way of a ship in the midst of the sea!' What is it that gives out this fire, which, like that of love, 'many waters cannot quench, neither can the floods drown it?' Theorists may speculate, naturalists may examine, chemists may analyze; but none of them can explain; and all agree in this, that it is a wonder, a mystery, a marvel. A light that only motion kindles! a fire that burns nothing! a fire, too, seen, not in a bush on Horeb, which is not burned, but in the deep waters of the ocean that _cannot_ be! Is not this a wonder? "And, if that path of light is a wonder, which streams back from the rudder of a ship, is not that ship itself a wonder? That a fabric so gigantic as a first rate ship, of traffic or of war, framed of ponderous timbers, compacted with bolts and bands of still more ponderous iron, holding in its bosom masses of merchandise, under whose weight strong cars have groaned, and paved streets trembled, or bearing on its decks hosts of armed men, with the thundering armament of a nation--that a fabric thus framed and thus freighted, should float in a fluid, into which, if a man fall, he sinks and is lost, is in itself a wonder. But that such a fabric should traverse oceans, struggling on amid the strife of seas and storms, that it should hold on its way like 'a thing of life,' nay, like a thing of intellect, a being endued with courage, and stimulated by a high purpose, a traveller that has seen the end of his voyage from the beginning, that goes forth upon it without fear, and completes it as with the feeling of a triumph, is, as it seems to me, a greater wonder still. Let me ask you to stand, as you perhaps have stood, upon the deck of such a ship, 'In the dead waist and middle of the night,'