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CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c.

No. 429.   New Series.

SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 1852.

Price 1½d.

THE SEA AND THE POETS.

Of three poets, each the most original in his language, and each peculiarly susceptible of impressions from external nature—Horace, Shakspeare, and Burns—not one seems to have appreciated the beauty, the majestic sublimity, the placid loveliness, alternating with the terrific grandeur, of the 'many-sounding sea.' Judging from their incidental allusions to it, and the use they make of it in metaphor and imagery, it would seem to have presented itself to their imaginations only as a fierce, unruly, untamable, and unsightly monster, to be loathed and avoided—a blot on the fair face of creation—a necessary evil, perhaps; but still an evil, and most certainly suggestive of no ideas poetic in their character.

It is marvellous, for there is not one of these poets who does not discover a lively sense of the varied charms of universal nature, and has not painted them in glowing colours with the pencil of a master. Who has not noted with what evident love, with what a nicely-discriminative knowledge Shakspeare has pictured our English flowers, our woodland glades, the forest scenery of Old England, before the desolating axe had prostrated the pride of English woods? How vividly has not Burns translated into vigorous verse each feature of his native landscape, till

live again in the magic of his song. And Horace—with what charming playfulness, with what exquisite grace, has he not figured the olive-groves of Tibur, the pendent vines ruddy with the luscious grape, the silver streams, the sparkling fountains and purple skies of fruitful Campania! Looking on nature with a poet's eye, as did these poets, one and all of them, is it not a psychological mystery that none of them should have detected the ineffable beauty of a sea-prospect?

First, as to Horace. When climbing the heights of Mount Vultur, that Lucanian hill where once, when overcome by fatigue, the youthful poet lay sleeping, and doves covered his childish and wearied limbs with leaves—Horace must have often viewed, with their wide expanse glittering in the sun, the waters of the Adriatic—often must he have hailed the grateful freshness of the sea-breeze and the invigorating perfumes of

Yet about this sea, which should have kindled his imagination and inspired his genius, this thankless bard poetises in a vein such as a London citizen, some half-century back, might have indulged in after a long, tedious, 'squally' voyage in an overladen Margate hoy.

No such spirit possessed him as that which dictated poor Campbell's noble apostrophe to the glorious 'world of waters:'

Horace, indeed, has sung the praises of Tarentum—that beautiful maritime city of the Calabrian Gulf, whose attractions were such as to make the delights of Tarentum a common proverbial expression. But what were these delights as celebrated by our poet?—the perfection of its honey, the excellence of its olives, the abundance of its grapes, its lengthened spring and temperate winter. For these, its merits, did Horace prefer, as he tells us, Tarentum to every other spot on the wide earth—his beloved Tibur only and ever excepted. In truth, Horace valued and visited the sea-side only in winter, and then simply because its climate was milder than that to be met with inland, and therefore more agreeable to the dilapidated constitution of a sensitive valetudinarian. His commentators suppose he produced nothing during his marine hybernations: if the inclement season froze 'the genial current of his soul,' the aspect of the sea did not thaw it.

His motive for his sea-side trips is amusingly set forth in one of the most lively and characteristic of his Epistles—the fifteenth of the first book. In this he inquires of a friend what sort of winter weather is to be found at Velia and Salernum; two cities, one on the Adriatic, the other on the Mediterranean seaboard of Italy—what manner of roads they had—whether the people there drank tank-water or spring-water—and whether hares, boars, crabs, and fish were with them abundant. He adds, he is not apprehensive about their wines—knowing these, as we may infer, to be good—although usually, when from home, he is scrupulous about his liquors; whilst, when at home, he can put up almost with anything in the way of potations. It is quite plain Horace went down to the sea just in the spirit in which a turtle-fed alderman would transfer himself to Cheltenham; or in which a fine lady, whose nerves the crush, hurry, and late hours of a London season had somewhat disturbed, would exchange the dissipations of Mayfair for the breezy hills of Malvern, or the nauseous waters of Tunbridge Wells.

This certainly explains, and perhaps excuses, the grossly uncivil terms in which alone he notices the sea. One of the worst of Ulysses' troubles was, according to him, the numerous and lengthy sea-voyages which that Ithacan gadabout had to take. Horace wishes for Mævius, who was his aversion, no worse luck than a rough passage and shipwreck at the end of it. His notion of a happy man—ille beatus—is one who has not to dread the sea. Augustus, whose success had blessed not only his own country, but the whole world, had—not the least of his blessings—given to the seamen a calmed sea—pacatum mare. Lamenting at Virgil's departure for Athens, he rebukes the impiety of the first mariner who ventured, in the audacity of his heart, to go afloat and cross the briny barrier interposed between nations. He esteems a merchant favoured specially by the gods, should he twice or thrice a year return in safety from an Atlantic cruise. He tells us he himself had known the terrors of 'the dark gulf of the Adriatic,' and had experienced 'the treachery of the western gale;' and expresses a charitable wish, that the enemies of the Roman state were exposed to the delights of both. He likens human misery to a sea 'roughened by gloomy winds;' 'to embark once more on the mighty sea,' is his figurative expression for once more engaging in the toils and troubles of the world; Rome, agitated by the dangers of civil conflict, resembles an ill-formed vessel labouring tempest-tossed in the waves; his implacable Myrtale resembles the angry Adriatic, in which also he finds a likeness to an ill-tempered lover. All through, from first to last, the gentle Horace pelts with most ungentle phrases one of the noblest objects in nature, provocative alike of our admiration and our awe, our terror and our love.

And even Shakspeare must be ranged in the same category. The most English of poets has not one laudatory phrase for

to the poet's England. It is idle to say that Shakspeare was inland-bred—that he knew nothing, and could therefore have cared nothing about the matter—seeing that, insensible as he might have been to its beauties, he makes constant reference to the sea, and even in language implying that his familiarity with it was not inferior to that of any yachtsman who has ever sailed out of Cowes Harbour. He uses nautical terms frequently and appropriately. Romeo's rope-ladder is 'the high top-gallant of his joy;' King John, dying of poison, declares 'the tackle of his heart is cracked,' and 'all the shrouds wherewith his life should sail' wasted 'to a thread.' Polonius tells Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'—a technical expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage in King Lear, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat, and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the relative proportions of the objects named. In Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes: however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare uniformly paints 'the multitudinous seas.'

In the Winter's Tale, we read of—

In Henry V., of 'the furrowed sea,' 'the lofty surge,' 'the inconstant billows dancing;' in Henry VI., Queen Margaret finds in the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo; in Richard III., Clarence's dream figures to us all the horrors of 'the vasty deep;' in Henry VIII., Wolsey indeed speaks of 'a sea of glory,' but also of his shipwreck thereon; in The Tempest we read of 'the never surfeited sea,' and of the 'sea-marge sterile and rocky-hard;' in the Midsummer's Night Dream, 'the sea' is 'rude,' and from it the winds 'suck up contagious fogs;' Hamlet is as 'mad as the sea and wind;' the violence of Laertes and the insurgent Danes is paralleled to an irruption of the sea, 'overpeering of his list;' in the well-known soliloquy is the expression, 'a sea of troubles,' which, in spite of Pope's suggested and tasteless emendation, commentators have shewn to have been used proverbially by the Greeks, and more than once by Æschylus and Menander. Still, Shakspeare, again like Horace, was not insensible to the merits of sea-air in a sanitary point of view. Dionyza, meditating Marina's murder, bids her take what the Brighton doctor's call 'a constitutional' by the sea-side, adding that—

As to Burns, his most fervent admirer can scarcely complain when we involve him in the censure to which we have already subjected Horace and Shakspeare. He, too, writes about the sea in such a fashion, that we should hardly have suspected, what is true, that he was born almost within hearing of its waves; that much of his life was passed on its shores or near them, and that at a time of life when external objects most vividly impress themselves on the senses, and exercise the largest influence on the taste.

The genius of 'Old Coila,' in sketching the poet's early life, says—

but few tokens of this 'delight' are to be observed in his poetry. He has, indeed, his allusions to 'tumbling billows' and 'surging foam;' to southern climes where 'wild-meeting oceans boil;' to 'life's rough ocean' and 'life's stormy main;' to 'hard-blowing gales;' to the 'raging sea,' 'raging billows,' 'boundless oceans roaring wide,' and the like; but these are the stock-metaphors of every poet, and would be familiar to him even had he never overpassed the frontiers of Bohemia.

One sea-picture, and one alone, is to be found in Burns, and this, it is freely admitted, is exquisite:

This charming lyric, the pathetic tenderness of which commends it to every feeling heart, is all that Burns has left in evidence that the sea had to him, at least, one poetic aspect.

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