"The voice of yearning, deep but scarce expressed,
For something which is not, but may be yet;
Too full of sad continuance to forget,
Too troubled with desires to be at rest,
Too self-conflicting ever to be blest."
In strong contrast with this is the exhilarating, tonic power of the sea. Coleridge, revisiting the seashore, cries:
"God be with thee, gladsome Ocean!
How gladly greet I thee once more."
Myers emphasises the fact that Swinburne, in his principal autobiographical poem, "Thalassius, or Child of the Sea," reveals a nature for which the elemental play of the ocean is the intensest stimulus. The author of that poem tells how once he wandered off into indulgence of personal feelings, and how his mother, the sea, recalled him from such wanderings to
"charm him from his own soul's separate sense
With infinite and invasive influence,
That made strength sweet in him and sweetness strong,
Being now no more a singer, but a song."
And akin to this exhilarating effect on a poet's sensibility is that which it has exercised on the large scale in moulding the characters and fortunes of seafaring nations. Longfellow had a firm grip of this historical fact:
"Wouldst thou (so the helmsman answered)
Learn the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery."
Allan Cunningham's sea songs furnish the classical expression of the spirit in its modern guise as embodied in the British sailor—the defender of the isle that is "compassed by the inviolate sea":
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The ever fresh, the ever free."
Byron may be criticised as too consciously "posing" in his well-known apostrophe to the ocean; nevertheless it contains a tang of the Viking spirit: