"Thy march is o'er the mountain wave,
Thy home is on the deep."

There is a dash of sea-craft for you; and, "cheered by the grateful sound, for many a league old ocean smiles."

And for the sickle! What! must the net and the harpoon go for nothing? No harvests on the barren flood! What else are pearl-fisheries, herring-fisheries, cod-fisheries, and whale-fisheries? "The sea! The deep, deep sea!" Why, the sea cannot keep its own; cannot defend the least or the mightiest of its nurselings from the hand of the gigantic plunderer Man.

——"thy fields,
Are not a spoil for him."

The fields of earth are not. For he ploughed and sowed ere he reaped, and earned back his own. But on thy fields, no ploughing, no sowing—all reaping! Sheer spoil. Poor, helpless, tributary, rifled, ravaged Ocean!

Then follows a very eminent instance of the fault which has been urged as radical in these Stanzas—forced, unnatural, wilful, or false sequence of thought; a deliberate intention in the mind of the writer, taking the place of the spontaneous free suggestion proper to poetry. We have had man trying to produce ruin on the ocean, and wrecked, swallowed up. Now, man tries to walk and reap the ocean. The poet has outraged mother earth, and her vengeance is upon him. He has wrongfully and wilfully brought in the Earth, for its old alliance with man to hear hard words; and he suffers the penalty. Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer, for you are out of breath. Mere mouthing is not command of words; the sound we hear now is but the echo of the last stanza, and the angry Childe is unwittingly repeating himself,—

——"Thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray,
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth—there let him lay!"

Here is again the contest, again the ruining upon earth,—nay, he destroys the earth itself—again the wrecking of the ship. Surely there is great awkwardness in stepping on from the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship, to the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship. "Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies" may be a vigorous verse, though we doubt it; but if the ship outlive the storm, which many a ship has done many a thousand times, it can be turned against the ocean, who has done his worst in vain. What is man's "petty hope?" and what means "again to earth?" Is it again from the skies—or back to the earth from which he embarked? Not one expression is precise; and so, with some scorn of man's old ally, who now so roughly receives him,—"there let him lay!" There is something very horrible indeed in insulting a dead man in the Cockney dialect.

In all this there is no dignity, no grandeur; Byron does not well to be angry—it is seldom that any man or poet does—for, though anger is a "short madness," it is not a "fine frenzy." Such Te Deum true Poetry never yet sang, for true Poetry never yet was blasphemous—never yet derided Man's Dread or Man's Hope, when sinking in multitudes in the sea, which God holds in the hollow of his hand.

Go on to the next Stanza—