But pray attend to this—no sooner does the sequent clause "save his own," take its place in the verse, than the word "remain" shifts its meaning back, from the signification accidentally forced upon it as has been explained, and reverts to its original and wonted power as a word of time! The force of the united clauses now stands thus—"upon the water there cannot be found a trace of the ruin executed by man. But of the ruin suffered by him there is an apparition, a vestige, a shadow, a vanishing display, namely—
"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."
He plunges, and all is over. The "bubbling groan" is the momentarily remaining notice of his extinction.
Now this first equivocation has an immediate moral consequence—namely, a reaction upon the feelings of the poet. "Remain," as an "extending in space," acts upon the imagination expansively here, if it were suffered to act—and if room were given it to act upon the imagination—inasmuch as "nor doth remain," as a word of extending in space, marks or helps to mark out the two great regions into which his lordship divides the terraqueous globe—ravaged land and unravaged water. But "remain," as an "extending in time," acts here contractively; and "nor remain" means now "does not outlive the moment!" and in this manner an entirely new direction or tenor is given to thought and feeling—for the zeal of diminishing seizes on the imagination of the writer. He is led to making man insignificant by the momentariness of his perishing! He has contracted, by power of scorn, and by the trick of a word, the seventy years of man into an instant. That is one diminution, and another follows upon it. The Fleets, wrecked whenever they fight against the water, vanish from his fancy, as in the shifting of a dream; and he sees, amidst the troubled world of waters—one man perishing! One mode of insignificancy admitted, induces another. With the shrinking of time to a moment goes along, the shrinking of multitude to one!
The same double-dealing takes place with the word "Man." Man signifies the individual human being—or the race. "Of man's first disobedience"—mankind's. "Man marks the earth with ruin"—mankind does so. "Nor doth remain a shadow of man's ravage"—of mankind's ravage. "When for a moment, like a drop of rain, he sinks into thy waves "—that is now the single sailor, whom a roll of the ship has hurled from the topmast into the waters; or, when the ship has gone down, some strong swimmer who has fought in vain upon the waters, and, spent in limb and heart, sinks. And thus the reader, after stumbling for two or three steps in darkness and perplexity, within a moment of having left mankind in the annihilating embrace of Ocean, upon a sudden finds himself set face to face with one man, we shall suppose "The last man," drowning!
In the Stanza now commented on, there was a struggle depicted, a question proposed between Man and the Ocean—which shall be the Wrecker? The Ocean prevails; Man is wrecked. In the succeeding Stanza there is, it would seem, another question moved between the same disputants. No, it is the same. Let us examine well. A moment before, Man appeared as treading the earth as a Destroyer, his proud step stayed at high water-mark. Now he appears upon the earth as a traveller and a reaper—by implication or allusion—by the figure of "not."
"His steps are not upon thy paths, thy fields
Are not a spoil for him."
He walks and reaps the earth; he does not walk and reap the ocean. This is plainly the process of the "worthy cogitation;" and unquestionably the assertion is true—true to the letter, but only to the letter. For, standing on Mount Albano, or on the Land's End, or here sitting beneath the porch of our Marine Villa fronting the Firth of Forth, we are poets every one of us, and we will venture beyond the letter;—
"His steps are not upon thy paths!"
—reply—chaunter of Man's Hope, and of England's Power,—