6. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was born at

Cummington, Massachusetts, where his father practiced medicine. He attended the district school and later studied law, but gave up his practice for journalism. He was very successful and was for many years editor of The New York Evening Post. This poem was written when he was unsettled and discouraged about his law practice.

A NIGHT IN THE TROPICS

BY RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR.

Those who have spent their lives on the ocean say that we dwellers on land know nothing of life under the open sky. The following extract is a bit of night scenery aboard ship in the days of wooden vessels with canvas wings.

One night while we were in the tropics, I went out to the end of the flying jib boom upon some duty; and having finished it, turned around and lay on the boom for a long time, admiring the beauty of the sight below me. Being so far out from the deck I could look at the ship 5 as at a separate vessel; and there rose up from the water, supported only by the small black hull, a pyramid of canvas spreading far out beyond the hull and towering up almost, as it seemed in the indistinct night, into the clouds. The sea was as still as an inland lake; the light trade wind was 10 gently and steadily breathing from astern; the dark-blue sky was studded with the tropical stars; there was no sound but the rippling of the water under the stem; and the sails were spread out wide and high—the two lower studding sails stretching out on either side far beyond the 15 deck; the topmost studding sails like wings to the topsails; the topgallant studding sails spreading fearlessly out above them; still higher the two royal studding sails, looking like two kites flying from the same string; and highest of all the little skysail, the apex of the pyramid, seeming 20 actually to touch the stars and to be out of reach of human hand. So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured in marble they could not have been more motionless—not a ripple on the surface of the canvas, not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail, so perfectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he said (for he 5 too, rough old man-of-war's man that he was, had been gazing at the show) half to himself, still looking at the marble sails: "How quietly they do their work!"

—Two Years Before the Mast.