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pretations, 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 color and life :-
"Oh, they rode on, and farther on,

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

And they waded through rivers aboon the temples, once resonant with instrument and

knee,

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song, and solemn dance of festive multitude,
that now stand apart in stern loneliness, re-
sisting 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,
Which roars forever on the restless shores;
Or visiting their solitary caves,
The lonely sound of winds, that moan around,
Accordant to the melancholy waves.” *
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
That Ocean is a mighty harmonist.” ‡
Elsewhere, again (written on a calm evening,
at Calais), that

That 'gainst the craggy cliffs did loudly rore, And in their raging surquedry disdaynd That the fast earth affronted them so sore, And their devouring covetize restraynd." § 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 embarrass"The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea: ment of riches in matériel pour servir. Take Listen! the mighty Being is awake, Southey for instance. He compares a mystic And doeth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder-everlastingly." § murmur in one of his Odes to the sound of the sea when it rakes on a stony shore." ** In some verses of his composed on the Easter He makes Thalaba's brain, with busy work- Sunday which made his sixty-third birthday, ings, feel the roar and raving of the rest-on a high part of the coast of Cumberland, less sea [roll your r's well, r-r-reader!], the while on a visit to his son, then rector of 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.

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Moresby, near Whitehaven, Wordsworth puts this characteristic question and answerafter 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?

*Curse of Kehama, book xv.

† Roderick, the Last of the Goths, book i. On the Power of Sound.

§ Miscellaneous Sonnets, XXX.

66

No, 'tis the earth-voice of the mighty sea, 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 often † 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 We sojourn, stunned by Ocean's ceaseless

roar-"

so he writes to Sir George Beaumont, evidently out of humor with himself, with outward things in general, and with old Ocean in particular :

Tired of my books, -a scanty company! And tired of listening to the boisterous sea." 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
Throu h yon reft house! O'er rolling stones
In bold ambitious sweep,

The onward-surging tides supply
The silence of the cloudless sky

With mimic thunders deep." §

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 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 Sealike, 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 gray 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 from this wave of the true, implacable sca, they pass. Would they, shuddering back 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, The sea's faint murmur." +

item,

And here it is he describes himself" in black soul-jaundiced fit a sad gloom-pampered man There it was, in that cot o'ergrown with to sit, and listen to the roar : when mountain white-flower'd jasmin and the broad-leaved surges bellowing deep, with an uncouth myrtle, that, addressing his "pensive Sara,” monster leap, plunge foaming on the shore." he could enter on its list of charms, this 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,

*Evening Voluntaries.

+ See Wordsworth's own Annotations on his

Poems, ed. 1857.

Epistle to Sir George Beaumont. § Lines written on Shurton Bars.

"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 descrip

* Ruskin The Harbors of England, 1856. +Meditative Poems, I.

The Eolian Harp.

tion 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,
And flings to shore his mustered force,
Burst with loud roar, their answer hoarse,
"Woe to the traitor, woe!'"*

The dark seas that encircle "thy rugged walls, Artonish!" 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." I And later again, "the short dark waves, heaved to the land, With ceaseless plash kissed cliff or sand :-It was a slumbrous sound." Nor may we forget the sacred music of Nature's cathedral in the isle of Staffa-who se 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
And still, between each awful pause,
From the high vault an answer draws,
In varied tone prolonged and high,
That mocks the organ's melody." ||

of Henry Taylor's poetical dramas, on the seashore near Hastings, where Leolf revists 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 dull by distemper; shall he sayby 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, Gives utterance to the injuries of time." † Another character, in another mood, in another play, of the same author's, "Hears the low plash of wave o'erwhelming wave, The loving lullaby of mother Ocean." 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. Peacock's quasiGorilla fiction,-she sitting on a rock, and listening to the dash of the waves, like a Nereid to Triton's shell-the gentleman remarks, “ This morning is fine and clear, and the wind blows over the sea. Yet this, to me at least is not a cheerful scene. "Nor to me," Miss Melincourt replies. "But our

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-long habits of association with the sound of sounding seas, and all their various harmonies :

"The tumbling tempest's dismal roar,

On the waste and wreck-strewed shore-
The howl and the wail of the prisoned waves,
Clamoring in the ancient caves,

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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, Most like the murmur of a far-off city.” ** 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." it There is a fine scene in one

*The Lady of the Lake, canto iii.
The Lord of the Isles, e. i.

+ Ibid., I. 14.

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the winds and the waters, have given them to us a voice of melancholy majesty: a voice not audible by those little children who are playing yonder on the shore. To them all scenes are cheerful. It is the morning of life; it is infancy that makes them so. "$

This may serve to remind us of those exquisite four stanzas, a deed without a name of Mr. Tennyson's, in which we hear the fisherman's boy as he shouts with his sister at play, and the sailor lad singing merrily in bereavement and bewilderment of grief, the his boat while the poet can but utter, in his iterated burden, " Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!" unable to, though yearning to, utter the thoughts that arise in him.

*Edwin the Fair, Act II. Sc. 2.
† Ibid.

Isaac Comnenus, Act II. Sc. 1.
Melincourt, ch. xx.

Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer sands in Devon far away, we overhear Mr. Kingsley saying, in a garden rhapsody of his. He shuts his eyes and listens."1 hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves gently upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And with the innumerable wave-sighs come innumerable memories, and faces which I shall never see again upon this earth. I will not tell even you, of that, old friend." *

and see it stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and byand-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to him, harmless fury. So should he love to "listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out, and man is a fossil on its shores."*

Of the veritable enunciation of Oceanspeech, by the way, Dr. Holmes instructs us in a later work † his physiological romance of a serpentine damosel- that it is with sharp semivowel consonantal sounds-frsh

that the sea talks; leaving all pure vowel sounds for the winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to the unyielding earth.

"I have a brilliant Scotch friend," wrote Thomas de Quincey, more than a quarter of a century since, "who cannot walk on the sea-shore-within sight of avni povychaopa, the multitudinous laughter of its waves, or within hearing of its resounding uproar, because they bring up, by links of old associations, too insupportably to his mind, the agitation of his glittering, but too fervid youth." We have been accustomed to M. Michelet describes the earth listening, identify this friend with Professor Wilson, in silent repose, to the plaints and menaces, though there may be passages in the writings" les plaintes, les colères du vieil Océan qui of Christopher North that may seem opposed frappe, recule et refrappe, avec des rimes to the identification. The following excerpt solennelles." And these "solemn rhymes" from the Noctes, however, has something of he pitches in a deep bass,-" Basse profonde a corroborating character. The Ettrick Shep-qu'on entend moins de l'oreille que de la herd is the speaker. "I couldna thole," he poitrine, qui heurte moins le rivage encore ваув, "to leeve on the sea-shore." "And que le cœur de l'homme. Avertissement pray why not, James?" asks Sir Kit. James mélancholique. C'est comme un appel réanswers: "That everlasting thunner sae dis-gulier que fait le balancier du temps."‡ turbs my imagination, that my soul has nae This balancier answers to Dr. Holmes's liquid rest in its ain solitude, but becomes trans- metronome. And the basso profondo sugfused as it were into the michty ocean, a' its gests a passage in another popular American, thochts as wild as the waves that keep foamin Mr. Herman Melville's picture of the coawa into naething, and then breakin back ral reef belt off Tahiti, thundering its disagain into transitory life-for ever and ever- tant bass upon the ear (to make a base pun, as if neither in sunshine nor moonlicht, that we might call it the Bass Rock), like the unmultitudinous tumultuousness, frae the first broken roar of a cataract. Dashing for ever creation o' the warld, had ever once been against their coral rampart," he compares stilled in the blessedness o' perfect sleep." them, in the distance, to a line of rearing white chargers, reined in, tossing their white manes, and bridling with foam.

The sea drowns out humanity and time, says Dr. Oliver Holmes; it has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song for ever and

ever.

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While touching on American authorship, let us glance at a verse or two of Professor Longfellow's attuned to wave-harmonics. An Yet he owns his wish for "a little box by awakened conscience he hexametrically comthe sea-shore." For he should love to gaze pares to the sea when moaning and tossing, out on what he calls the "wild feline ele-beating remorseful and loud the mutable ment" from a front window of his own, just as he should love to look on a caged panther, *Kingsley's Miscellanies, vol. i. "My WinterGarden."

De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches, vol. ii. ch. iv. Noctes Ambrosianæ, May, 1830.

sands of the sea-shore." At another time

* Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, ch. xi.
+ Elsie Venner, ch. xix.

L'Amour, par. J. Michelet, 1. v. ch. v.

§ Omoo; or, Adventures in the South Seas, ch.. lxxi. || The Courtship of Miles Standish, IV.

we have this military metaphor: "Gleamed
far off the crimson banners of morning;
"Under them loud on the sands, the serried bil-
lows, advancing,

Fired along the line, and in regular order re-
treated."

In his Golden Legend again, Elsie, coming forth from her chamber upon the terrace, lis

tone;

"Listening there, night and day,
What the troubled waters say;
For they often writhe and moan,
From the mid Atlantic blown,
And will tell you ghastly tales
Of what befalleth in the gales,
Till you steal unto your rest

With a pain upon your breast."*

Sir Walter Scott enhances the sombre eftens to the solemn litany that begins in rocky fect of the catastrophe in his " Bride of Lamcaverns, "as a voice that chants alone to the mermoor" by the sound he makes us overhear pedals of the organ, in monotonous under-from the projecting cliff, Wolf's Crag, that "The roar of beetles on the German Ocean. the sea had long announced their approach to the cliffs, on the summit of which, like, the nest of some sea-eagle, the founder of the fortalice had perched his eyry. . . . A wilder, or more disconsolate dwelling, it was perhaps difficult to conceive. The sombrous and heavy sound of the billows, successively dashing against the rocky beach at a profound distance beneath, was to the ear what the landscape was to the eye-a symbol of unvaried and monotonous melancholy, not unmingled with horror."t

"And anon from shelving beaches And shallow sands beyond, In snow-white robes uprising The ghostly choirs respond," or, as Prince Henry phrases it, the effect is that of "Cecilia's organ sounding in the seas."+

Warton pictures the "mother of musings, Contemplation sage," gazing steadfast on the spangled vault (her "grotto stands upon the topmost rock of Teneriffe "),—

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In his dreamy musings on the sea-shore, there comes a mood in which Nathaniel Hawthorne exclaims: "Get ye all gone, old friends, and let me listen to the murmur of the sea,-a melancholy voice, but less sad than

Of distant billows soothe her pensive ear With hoarse and hollow sounds." + The traveller in Cornwall may descend into into mines the ramifications of which extend for miles, and which, as in that of Botallack, run far and deep beneath the bed of the At-yours. Of what mysteries is it telling? Of lantic. "He may there listen to the booming of the waves and the grating of the stones, as they are rolled too and fro over his head," sounds by which the miners themselves, we are told, are at times appalled and driven from their work, and which they, almost as a matter of course, connect with quaint legends and wild superstitions.

In the lyrics of one who for a dozen years and more (1831 to 1842) was almost uniformly the successful candidate for the Seatonian prize, we listen to

the great sea's eternal roar,
Advancing or retreating,
That seems, as on the ear afar,
It falls so deep and regular,

The pulse of nature beating." ||

Barry Cornwall has a Salvator-like sketch of "white-browed cliffs that keep watch above the toiling Deep,”—

*The Courtship of Miles Standish, V.

+ Golden Legend: The Inn at Genoa. Thomas Warton, Pleasures of Melancholy.

§ Biogr. and Criticism from the Times, First Series, p. 246.

Poems by T. E. Hankinson, "St. Paul."

sunken ships, and whereabouts they lie? Of islands afar and undiscovered, whose tawny children are unconscious of other islands and continents, and deem the stars of heaven their nearest neighbors? Nothing of all this? What then? Has it talked for so many ages, and meant nothing all the while? No; for those ages find utterance in the sea's unchanging voice, and warn the listener to withdraw his interest from mortal vicissitudes, and let the infinite idea of eternity pervade his soul."

At once the reader is reminded, no doubt, of little Paul Dombey waking, starting up, and sitting to listen. What at? His sister Florence asks him what he thought he heard. "I want to know what it says," he answered, "The sea, looking steadily into her face. Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?" She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves. "Yes, yes," he said: "but I know that they are always say

*Dramatic Scenes, by Barry Cornwall, pp. 336-7. + Bride of Lammermoor, penultimate chapter. Twice-told Tales: Foot-prints on the Sea-shore.

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