236 CONFEDERATE PORTRAITS
quet of roses. The roses were very sweet, and made me homesick for a while." 23 Again, "I am quite homesick this quiet Sunday morning. I am two long, long years and more absent from my family, and there are no signs
The same sensibility that shows in this home feeling manifests itself in other ways. Semmes was not only a wide reader in his profession and in lines connected with it, but he loved literature proper, read much poetry and quotes it often. He was singularly sensitive to beauty in any form.
Above all, his diary reads almost like that of a natural- ist — Darwin or Bates — in its singularly close, intelligent, and affectionate observation of nature. Roving all over the tropic world of land and water, at a time when such study was less common than now, he kept his eyes open for both exceptional and ordinary natural phenomena. He had the keenest interest in the working of tides, storms, and currents, and not only records minutely all the empirical detail of such matters, but goes into elaborate discussion of the causes of them, illustrat- ing with plans and diagrams which quaintly diversify the cargo-lists of Yankee schooners and the recital of attempts to blarney pompous officials of Portugal and Spain.
Nor is the appreciation of the charm of nature less than the sense of its scientific interest. Every opportu- nity of landing is seized as giving the tired sea-wanderer
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