Qualmy-jumbling,
Spirit-humbling,
Shingle-stumbling,
Sea-weed fumbling,
Wearing, crumbling,
Mischief-mumbling,
Growling, grumbling,
Like thunder far off rumbling— —
That last line halteth in its feet, as well it may, when the poet cannot keep his legs. Oh! it is well for Cornwall, born perchance “with one foot on sea and one foot on shore” at the Land’s End,—I have seen a picture of it by Turner, a bare bleak rocky promontory, with some nineteen gulls and cormorants sitting thereon, each with its tail turned contemptuously towards the barren granite, feldspar, and like sordid soils which there represent land.—It is well enough for him to chaunt laudations of the briny element, and cry up those amphibia, his first cousins almost, the Nereids and Tritons. Or it may become those others, born in a berth, and christened in brine, with Neptune for sponsor, to sing slightingly of the dry ground, on which they cannot claim even a parish. But my nativity was otherwise cast—I am a grass lamb, yeaned on the green sward—oh sweet sweet sweet Cropton-le-Moor, down in dear dear Wiltshire!
