that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this.

A goney, he replied. Goney! Never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! Never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.

I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth