that the host undertake a night march, and, as they tramp along in the stillness of the season, "hear the roar of murmuring billows on the sounding shore."* But enough even of Popish Greek, for the "general reader." Nor will we overwhelm him with the din of Latin billowbluster, percussa fluctu littora, or nauseate him with marine stores of threadbare epithets, Et gemitum ingentem pelagi pulsataque saxa ... fractasque ad littora voces, to be had in such plenty, for the asking, of Virgil and the rest. Suffice it to take leave of the ancients, with the remark, that not to them, as to melancholy moderns, does the Sea appear to have uttered doleful sounds. Their epithets for wave-music, and ours, differ in this respect, almost as allegro from penseroso. For a later generation it was reserved to popularise a sentimental song about the Sad Sea Waves, Grant him to have been not only stark blind, but a beggar withal, it may be doubted whether the bard on the Chian strand aforesaid, heard much sadness in the waves, or took their music to be set, as pervadingly and prevailingly as plaintively, in the minor key. Had he the means, as no doubt with his marine predilections he would have the will, to retire, like Lord Bute, to a marine villa, for the last lustre or decade of his life, he would not, like Lord Bute at his marine villa (on the edge of the cliff at Christchurch, overlooking the Needies and the Isle of Wight), have been absorbed, as Sir Egerton Brydges tells us that discarded statesman was, in "the melancholy roar of the sea." Homer would have detected, and delighted in, something more than a monotone, even though most musical most melancholy, in the voices of the deep. We are about to collate, from all sorts of writers, a variety of allusions to, and as it were subjective translations, or private interpretations, of the meanings of wave-music. What an eerie impressiveness there is in that stanza of the old ballad-needing no pictorial adjectives to bring out colour and life: O they rode on, and farther on, And they waded thro' rivers aboon the knee, But they heard the roaring of the sea.† In another old ballad occurs an epithet that sounds oddly to modern ears, if conversant at least with the resources of modern slang it is where the Lass of Lochroyan, in quest of Lord Gregory, sees the stately tower Shining sae clear and bright, Whilk stood aboon the jawing wave, Built on a rock of height. By "jawing" is meant "dashing"-though the adept in slang will peradventure prefer his interpretation of the phrase, as equally applicable, and a deal more graphic. Spenser describes "the surges hore That 'gainst the craggy cliffs did loudly rore, * Pope's Homer's Iliad, IX. 237-8. †Thomas the Rhymer. § Pride, presumption. Thomson is satisfied with a mere "nought was heard But the rough cadence of the dashing [i.e. jawing] wave. Beattie lets his lone enthusiast oft take his way, musing onward, to the sounding shore, and there listening with "pleasing dread, to the deep roar of the wide-weltering waves." But it is when we get among poets of the nineteenth century that we begin to feel the embarrassment of riches in matériel pour servir. Take Southey for instance. He compares a mystic murmur in one of his Odes to "the sound of the sea when it rakes on a stony shore." He makes Thalaba's brain, with busy workings, feel "the roar and raving of the restless sea [roll your r's well, r-r-reader!], the boundless waves that [double your r's again] rose and rolled and rocked: the everlasting sound Opprest him, and the heaving infinite."§ Let no reader attempt aloud the above passage, whose double r's are liable to be taken for double u's. A few stanzas farther on, we are made to mark how "the dash of the outbreakers deadened," until, at their utmost bound, the waters "silently rippled on the rising rock." Elsewhere Southey pictures some ancient temples, once resonant with instrument and song, and solemn dance of festive multitude, that now stand apart in stern loneliness, resisting the surf and surge that beat in vain on their deep foundations, and Now as the weary ages pass along, Hearing no voice save of the Ocean flood, The lonely sound of winds, that moan around. And once more, the painful pilgrims in "Roderick” are cheered, towards the end of their course, by beholding the sea, "the aim and boundary of their toil," on either side "the white sand sparkling to the sun," and hearing "Great Ocean with its everlasting voice, as in perpetual jubilee proclaim the wonders of the Almighty," filling thus the pauses of their fervent orisons. Or take Wordsworth, and ask him, what are the wild waves saying? And he will tell you that not only do innumerable voices fill the heavens with everlasting harmony, but that The towering headlands, crowned with mist, Their feet among the billows, know Elsewhere, again (written on a calm evening, at Calais), that The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make In some verses of his composed on the Easter Sunday which made his sixty-third birthday, on a high part of the coast of Cumberland, while * Britannia. The Warning Voice, Ode ii. Curse of Kehama, book xv. **On the Power of Sound. †The Minstrel, book i. § Thalaba the Destroyer, book xii. Roderick, the Last of the Goths, book i. †† Miscellaneous Sonnets, XXX. on a visit to his son, then rector of Moresby, near Whitehaven, Wordsworth puts this characteristic question and answer-after first noticing that "silent, and steadfast as the vaulted sky, the boundless plain of waters seems to lie :"— Comes that low sound from breezes rustling o'er The grass-crowned headland that conceals the shore? Whispering how meek and gentle he can be !* Dorothy, the poet's sister-" such heart was in her, even then"—when, as a little child, she first heard the voice of the sea from this point, and beheld the scene outspread before her-including "the town and port of Whitehaven, and the white waves breaking against its quays and docks" -burst into tears. The Wordsworth family then lived at Cockermouth, and this fact was oftent mentioned among them as indicating the sensibility for which she was so remarkable, and upon which Mr. de Quincey, in his Lake Reminiscences, has commented with such feeling eloquence. In 1811, Wordsworth seems to have had almost a sickness of sea sounds-during a too prolonged sojourn on the south-west coast of Cumberland : Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore so he writes to Sir George Beaumont, evidently out of humour with himself, with outward things in general, and with old Ocean in particular: Tired of my books, a scanty company! From Wordsworth turn to Coleridge, and his interpretation of marine melodies. From a retreat near Bridgewater he wrote, in 1795, in answer to a letter from Bristol, stanzas sixteen and sweet, of which this is the one to our purpose: And hark, my Love! The sea-breeze moans With mimic thunders deep.§ And here it is he describes himself "in black soul-jaundiced fit a sad gloom-pampered man to sit, and listen to the roar: when mountain surges bellowing deep, with an uncouth monster leap, plunge foaming on the shore." A bit of wave-painting, by the way, that shows how S. T. C. would have appreciated Mr. Ruskin's pictorial analysis of a composite wave, and his protest against the pretty platitudes that pass current on canvas for the real thing. We are to be reproached, who, familiar with the Atlantic, are yet, as the Oxford Graduate does reproach us, ready to accept with faith, as types of sea, what he calls the small waves en papillote, and peruke-like puffs of farinaceous foam, which were *Evening Voluntaries. † See Wordsworth's own Annotations on his Poems, ed. 1857. Lines written on Shurton Bars. the delight of Backhuysen and his compeers. "If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them with belief, and magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave, let it roll up to them, through the room-one massive fathom's height and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once-dividing, Red Sea-like, on right hand and left-but, at least, setting close before their eyes for once, in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its green, mountainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest-heavy as iron, fitful as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven edge-its furrowed flanks, all ghastly clear, deep in transparent death, but all laced across with lurid nets of spume, and tearing open into meshed interstices their churned veil of silver fury, showing still the calm grey abyss below, that has no fury and no voice, but is as a grave always open, which the green sighing mounds do but hide for an instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering back from this wave of the true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the papillotes ?" It might be so, Mr. Ruskin is constrained to suppose; because that is what we are all doing, more or less, continually. But to Coleridge again. In serener style and happier mood is conceived and expressed his picture of the "pretty cot" he occupied a year later (1796), into whose chamber-window peeped his garden's tallest rose, and whence he could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, There it was, in that cot o'ergrown with white-flower'd jasmin, and the broad-leaved myrtle, that, addressing his "pensive Sara," he could enter on its list of charms, this item, The stilly murmur of the distant sea Tells us of silence.‡ About Scott there is a much stronger spice of the Homeric spirit in every respect; and it shows itself in his sea similitudes inter alia. Quite Homer-like is the simile in his description of the Highland clansmen answering the appeal of the grisly priest, when he uplifted the yew Cross, with anathema on every recreant vassal-and they, in response, clattered their naked brands, And first, in murmur low, Then, like the billow in his course, That far to seaward finds his source, Burst, with loud roar, their answer hoarse, "Woe to the traitor, woe !"§ The dark seas that encircle "thy rugged walls, Artornish !" heave on the beach a softer wave, As mid the tuneful choir to keep The diapason of the Deep. But presently the same poem tosses us on "broken waves, where in white foam the ocean raves upon the shelving shore." * Ruskin: The Harbours of England, 1856. The Eolian Harp. The Lord of the Isles, c. i. And later again, "the Meditative Poems, I. The Lady of the Lake, canto iii. ¶Ibid., I. 14. short dark waves, heaved to the land, With ceaseless plash kiss'd cliff or sand-It was a slumbrous sound."* Nor may we forget the sacred music of Nature's cathedral in the isle of Staffa-whose columns seem to rise, and arches to bend, as in a Minster erected to her Maker's praise: Nor of a theme less solemn tells That mighty surge, that ebbs and swells, In Byron we have a "little billow crost By some low rock or shelve, that made it fret Against the boundary it scarcely wet." With Hartley Coleridge we hear "the many-sounding seas, and all their various harmonies: The tumbling tempest's dismal roar, On the waste and wreck-strew'd shore- Like a stifled pain that asks for pity :— and with him too we hear the sea at peace," Lost in one soft and multitudinous ditty, In Delta Moir, "Remotest Ocean's tongue is heard Declaiming to his island shores;" and in Festus Bailey, "the low lispings of night's silvery seas." There is a fine scene in one of Henry Taylor's poetical dramas, on the sea-shore near Hastings, where Leolf revisits the rocks that beheld his boyhood-" Here again I stand, Again and on the solitary shore Old ocean plays as on an instrument, Making that ancient music, when not known!" Again upon his ear, "as in the season of susceptive youth, the mellow murmur falls"-but finds the sense dulled by distemper; shall he say-by time ? Emma coming in, finds him discoursing to the sea of ebbs and flows; explaining to the rocks How from the excavating tide they win A voice poetic, solacing though sad, Which, when the passionate winds revisit them, Another character, in another mood, in another play, of the same author's, Hears the low plash of wave o'erwhelming wave, For mainly it is the mood of the man that makes or mars the music of the waters, and determines the key they are set in, major or minor, gladsome or drear. When Forester and Anthelia meet at sunrise on the beach, in Mr. † Canto iv. 11. *The Lord of the Isles, c. iii. 28. Don Juan, c. ii. Domestic Verses by Delta, p. 135; The Mystic, by P. J. Bailey, p. 115. Edwin the Fair, Act II. Sc. 2. †† Isaac Comnenus, Act II. Sc. 1. ** Ibid. |