Titanic

by Filson Young

In the first few minutes her giant powers made themselves felt. As she was slowly gathering way she passed the liner New York, another ocean monarch, which was lying like a rock moored by seven great hawsers of iron and steel. As the Titanic passed, some mysterious compelling influence of the water displaced by her vast bulk drew the New York towards her; snapped one by one the great steel hawsers and pulled the liner from the quayside as though she had been a cork. Not until she was within fifteen feet of the Titanic, when a collision seemed imminent, did the ever-present tugs lay hold of her and haul her back to captivity.

The symbols of Honour and Glory and Time that looked so handsome in the flooding sunlight of the Titanic’s stairway lie crushed into unrecognizable shapes and splinters beneath the tonnage of two thousand fathoms of ocean water. Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine. The Titanic was in more senses than one a fool’s paradise. There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will always be more than his match.

There is nothing so hard, nothing so entirely dignified, as to be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror.

For the iron forest has branched again, and its dreadful groves are echoing anew to the clamour of the hammers and the drills. Another ship, greater and stronger even than the lost one, is rising within the cathedral scaffoldings; and the men who build her, companions of those whom the Titanic spilled into the sea, speak among themselves and say, “this time we shall prevail.”