No words in Scripture are so strange to him as these, "There shall be no more sea." The course of his voyage in the
Shipwreck
, brings him past lands the most famous in the ancient world for arts and arms, for philosophy, patriotism, and poetry. And sore does he labour to lash himself into inspiration as he apostrophizes them; but in vain—the result is little else than furious feebleness and stilted bombast. But when he returns to the element, the impatient, irregular, changeful, treacherous, terrible ocean—and watches the night, winged with black storm and red lightning, sinking down over the Mediterranean, and the devoted bark which is helplessly struggling with its billows, then his blood rises, his verse heaves, and hurries on, and you see the full-born poet—
"High o'er the poop the audacious seas aspire,
Uproll'd in hills of fluctuating fire:
With labouring throes she rolls on either side,
And dips her gunnells in the yawning tide.
Her joints unhinged in palsied langour play,
As ice-flakes part beneath the noontide ray;
The gale howls doleful through the blocks and shrouds,
And big rain pours a deluge from the clouds.
From wintry magazines that sweep the sky,
Descending globes of hail incessant fly;
High on the masts with pale and lurid rays,
Amid the gloom portentous meteors blaze!
The ethereal dome in mournful pomp array'd,
Now buried lies beneath impervious shade,—
Now flashing round intolerable light,
Redoubles all the horrors of the night.
Such terror Sinai's trembling hill o'erspread,
When Heaven's loud trumpet sounded o'er its head.
It seem'd the wrathful angel of the wind,
Had all the horrors of the skies combined;
And here to one ill-fated ship opposed,
At once the dreadful magazine disclosed."
This is noble writing. "Deep calleth unto deep." It reminds us of Pope's translation of that tremendous passage in the 8th Book of the
Iliad
, where Jove comes forth, and darts his angry lightnings in the eyes of the Grecians, and repels and appals their mightiest; Nestor alone, but with his horse wounded by the dart of Paris, sustaining the divine assault.
Lord Byron, in his letter to Bowles in defence of Pope, alludes to Falconer's
Shipwreck
, and cites it in proof of the poetical use which may be made of the works of art. But it has justly been remarked by Hazlitt, in his very masterly reply, published in the