"Go and see Liston," said the doctor.
"I am Liston," said the actor.
And thus the inner soul of a great humorist is often as unrecognized
by those who read him as was the natural personality of Liston by the
doctor.
FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE.
Every man when he first crosses the ocean is a Columbus to himself, no
matter how many voyages by other navigators he may have heard described
or read recorded. Geographies convince only the brain, not the senses,
that the globe is round; and when personal experience exhibits the fact,
it is as wonderful as if never before suggested. You have dwelt for
weeks within one unbroken loneliness of sea and sky, with nothing that
seemed solid in the universe but the bit of painted wood on which you
have floated. Suddenly one morning something looms high and cloudlike
far away, and you are told that it is land. Then you feel, with all
ignorant races, as if the ship were a god, thus to find its way over
that trackless waste, or as if this must be some great and unprecedented
success, and in no way the expected or usual result of such enterprises.
A sea-captain of twenty-five years' experience told me that this
sensation never wore off, and that he still felt as fresh a sense of
something extraordinary, on making land, as upon his first voyage. To
discover for one's self that there is really another side to the ocean,
--that is the astonishing thing.
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