The Sea, the Sea
, are in everybody's mouth. We remember a young student at Glasgow College, long since dead—George Gray by name—a thin lame lad, with dark mild eyes, and a fine spiritual expression on his pale face, handing in to Professor Milne of the Moral Philosophy class, some lines which he read to his class, and by which they, as well as the old, arid, although profound and ingenious philosopher, were perfectly electrified. We shall quote all we remember of them, and it will be thought much, when we state that twenty-five years have elapsed since we read them. They began—
"The storm is up; the anchor spring,
And man the sails, my merry men;
I must not lose the carolling
Of ocean in a hurricane;
My soul mates with the mountain storm,
The cooing gale disdains.
Bring Ocean in his wildest form,
All booming thunder-strains;
I'll bid him welcome, clap his mane;
I'll dip my temples in his yeast,
And hug his breakers to my breast;
And bid them hail! all hail, I cry,
My younger brethren hail!
The sea shall be my cemetery
Unto eternity.
How glorious 'tis to have the wave
For ever dashing o'er thee;—
Besides that dull and lonesome grave,
Where worms and earth devour thee.
My messmates, when ye drink my dirge,
Go, fill the cup from ocean's surge;
And when ye drain the beverage up,
Remember Neptune in the cup.
For he has been my brawling host,
Since first I roam'd from coast to coast;
And he my brawling host shall be—
I love his ocean courtesy—
His boisterous hospitality."
These lines, to us at least, seem to echo the rough roar of the breakers, as they rush upon an iron-bound coast. Poor G. Gray! He now sleeps, not in the bosom of that old Ocean he loved so dearly, but, we think, in the kirkyard of Douglas, in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire,—a light early quenched,—but whose memory this notice and these lines may, perhaps, for a season, preserve! The
Sea
still lies over, after all written in prose or rhyme regarding it, as the subject for a great poem; and it will task all the energies of even the truest poet.
[The Shipwreck]
in three cantos.