Perhaps I mingle in recollection the nature-worship of the two septennates, for of the former was my first rapturous vision of the open sea, which comes back to me with the memory of the pines.  I had gone with my father and mother to New York on a visit to my eldest brother, who had just then finished the engines of the steamer Diamond, which was the first that by her build was enabled to run through from New York to Albany, past the “overslough” or bar formed in the Hudson, which prevented the steamers of greater draught from getting up to the wharf at Albany; and he had profited by her first trip to visit home again and take us back with him.  My brother pointed out to me the Clermont, Fulton’s trial steamer, then disused and lying at Hoboken, but a cockboat to the Diamond, which was one of the greatest successes of the day.  Machinery fascinated me, being of the mechanical breed, and I can recall the engines of the boat, which were of a new type, working horizontally, and so permitting larger engines in proportion to the draught of the steamer than had been before used.  We all went one day to Coney Island, on the southern shore of Long Island, since a fashionable bathing place for New York, but then a solitary stretch of seashore, with a temporary structure where bathers might get refreshments, and a few bathing boxes.  We drove out in my brother’s buggy, and as, at a turn in the road, I caught a glimpse of the distant sea horizon, I rose in the buggy, shouting, “The sea! the sea!” and, in an uncontrollable frenzy, caught the whip from my brother’s hand and slashed the horse in wild delirium, unconscious of what I was doing.  The emotion remains uneffaceable after more than threescore years, one of the most vivid of my life.  It was a rapture and an interesting case of heredity, for I had not before been within a hundred and fifty miles of the sea.

And how ecstatic was the sensation of the plunge into the breakers, holding fast to my mother’s hand, and then the race up the beach before the next comber, trembling lest it should catch me, as if it were a living thing ready to devour me.  They never come back, these first emotions of childhood; and though I have loved the sea all my life, I have never again felt the sight of it as then.

Of this first period, I remember very well the grand occasion of the opening of the Hudson and Mohawk Railroad, the first link in that line which is now the New York Central, and see vividly the curious old coaches,—­three coach bodies together on one truck.  This was in 1832, when I was four years old.  The road was, I believe, the first successful passenger railway in America, and was sixteen miles long, with two inclined planes up which the trains were drawn, and down which they were lowered by cables.  There was an opposition line of stagecoaches between Albany and Schenectady, running at the same price and making the same time.