"The wrecks are all thy deed,"
which shows us a thousand ships foundering in mid ocean, and the earth's shores all strewn with fragments of oak-leviathans, we have instantaneously substituted, as if this were the same thing,
"When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown."
What has happened? What is meant? Is this literally the representation of some single human being actually dropping, as unfortunately happens from time to time, from a ship's side into the immensity of waters? And is this horrible game and triumph of Ocean, which threatened to annihilate the species, upon a sudden confined to "a man overboard?" Or are we to understand that, by a strong feat of uncreating and recreating imagination, this one man, dropped as if naked from the clouds into the sea and submerged, impersonates and impictures, by some concentration of human agony and of human impotence, that universally diffused annihilation of Man in his ships which was the matter in hand? We do not believe that any reader can give a satisfactory explanation or account of the course of thinking that has been here pursued. Upon the face of the words lies that natural pathos which belongs to the perishing of the individual, which serves to blind inquiry, and stands as a substitute for any reasonable thinking at all; and thus a grammatical confusion between Man and a man makes the whole absolute nonsense.
Then look here:—
"Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed."
This is not only not true—it is false. If man, clothed in the thunder of war, is able to strew ruin upon the land, he, militant, by the same power, strews wreck and ruin upon the waters; and so the distinction pretended, whatever it might be worth, fails. And does not the swallowing of the unknelled and uncoffined, which is attributed to the sea as the victor of man, take place as effectually when beak or broadside sends down a ship with her hundreds of souls, when the great sea, willing or unwilling, appears merely as the servile minister of insulting man's hate and fury?
"Alike the Armada's pride and spoils of Trafalgar."
"Rule Britannia" rings in our ears, and gives that assertion the lie. Does Macaulay's Ode idly recount an ineffectual muster? Did the Lord High Admiral of England, with all his commodores and captains, do nothing to the Armada? With what face dared an English Poet say to the sea that on all those days "the wrecks were all thy deed?" The storms were England's allies indeed, from Cape Clear to the Orcades. But only her allies; and, much as we respect the storms and their services, we say to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed." At Trafalgar the storms finally sided with the Spaniards. "Let the fleet be anchored," said Nelson ere he died; and, had that been possible, it had been done by Collingwood. After the fight Gravina came out to the rescue—but the sea engulfed the spoils. Yet, spite of that, we say again to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed;" and the sea answers—and will answer to all eternity—"Ay, ay, ay!"
Byron, we verily believe, was the first Great Poet that owned not a patriot's heart. No pride ever had he in his Country's triumphs either on land or sea. It seems as if he were impatient of every national and individual greatness that, however far aloof from his sphere, might eclipse his own. He has written well—but not so well as he ought to have done—of Waterloo. The glory of Wellington overshadowed him; and, by keeping his name out of his verses, he would keep the hero himself out of sight. But there he is resplendent in spite of the Poet's spleen. Verbum non amplius for Trafalgar! not one for Nelson. Not so did Cowper—the pious, peace-loving Cowper—regard his country's conflicts. At thought of these the holy Harper's soul awoke. He too sung of the sea:—