But there is a meaning and a good one in a way. Αριστον μεν ύδωρ. The water civilises the land. 'Tis an old remark—but how? By ships. Here, then, are the tables turned. Lately the sea did nothing with ships but destroy them. Now it patiently wafts them, and by commerce and colonies the Sea civilises the Globe! Surely this is poetical injustice. The first glory of the Sea was, that Man could not sail upon its bosom. The second glory of the Sea is, that, by offering its bosom to be furrowed by Man's daring and indefatigable keels, it—ministerially then—civilises the World. The Sea is the civiliser of the Land—Man is—the Destroyer merely.
Pray, what is the meaning of saying that the Roman and the Assyrian Empires are shores of the Sea: and changed, excepting that the same waters wash the same strands? The deep inland Empires recede too much from the sea-shore to allow any hold to the relation proposed in the words, "changed in all save thee." We know the Sea as their limit—an accident, rather than as a part of their being. The meeting of sea and land being the limit of an empire, the limit remains whilst the Imperial State has withered from the land. Does the immobility of the limit belong more to one element than to the other? And is the Roman Empire, O Neophyte, more unchanged in the Mediterranean and Atlantic than it is in the Apennines, and Alps, and Pyrenees, and Helvellyn?
Every clause that regards Earth is, in one way or in another, intolerable—small or tortured. "Thy waters wasted them while they were free," means either "swallowed up their ships, or—ate away their edges!" Alas! that most unhappy meaning is the true one—and what a cogitation to come into a man's—an inspired Poet's head! "Thy waters fretted away the maritime littoral edges of the Assyrian, the Grecian, the Roman, the Carthaginian Empires, whilst those Empires flourished!" And this interesting piece of geographical, and geological, and hydrographical meditation makes part in a burst of indignant spleen which is to go near to annihilating Man from the face of the Globe! Was it possible to express more significantly the imbecility of Old Ocean? And has he not been fretting ever since? And are not the limits the same, as we were told a minute ago? Old Ocean must be in his dotage if he can do no more than that—and we must elect him perpetual President of the Fogie Club.
Such wretched writing shows, with serious warning, how a false temper, admitted into poetry, overrules the sound intellect into gravely and weightily entertaining combinations of thought which, looked at either with common sense or with poetical feeling, cannot be sustained for a moment. How many of Lord Byron's admirers believe—and, in spite of Christopher, will continue to believe—that in these almost senseless stanzas he has said something strong, poignant, cutting, of good edge, and "full of force driven home!"
"Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow—
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."
We accept the image; let us grant that the Personification is a fine one. Nevertheless it does not entirely satisfy the imagination. And why? Because the thought of the azure brow, on which time writes no wrinkles, suggests for a moment the thought of the white brow—the brow of man or woman—the human brow, on which Time does write wrinkles along with the engraver, Sorrow. For a moment! but that is not the intended pathos—and it fades away. The intended pathos here belongs to the wrinkles Time writes on the brow of the Earth—while it spares that of the Sea. But Time deals not so with our gracious Mother Earth. Time keeps perpetually beautifying her brow, while it leaves the brow of Ocean the same as it was at Creation's Dawn. How far more beautiful has the Dædal Earth been growing, from century to century, over Continent and Isle, under the love of her grateful children! The Curse has become a Blessing. In the sweat of their brow they eat their bread; but Nature's self, made lovelier by their labour of heart and hand, rejoices in their creative happiness, and troubled life prepares rest from its toil in many a pleasant place fair as the bowers of Paradise.
We approach the next Stanza reverently, for it has a religious look—an aspect "that threatens the profane."
"Thou glorious Mirror, where the Almighty's Form
Glasses itself in tempests," &c.
Suitably recited! let it be suitably spoken of—fearlessly, in truth. The vituperating spirit has exhausted itself—is dead; and all at once the Poet becomes a worshipper. From cherished exasperation with the Creature—from varying moods of hate and scorn—he turns to contemplation of the Creator. Such transition is suspicious—can such worship be sincere? Fallen, sinful—yet is man God's noblest work. In His own image did He create him; and to glorify Him must we vilify the dust into which He breathed a living soul? Let the Poet lament, with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, over what Man has made of Man! And in the multitude of thoughts within him adore his Maker—in words. But he who despises his kind, and delights, in heaping contumely on the race of man throughout all his history on earth and sea—how may he, when wearied with chiding, all at once, as if it had been not hindrance but preparation, dare to speak, in the language of worship, of the Almighty Maker of Heaven and of Earth?
The Stanza, accordingly, is not good—it is laboured, heavy, formal, uninspired by divine afflatus. There is not in it one truly sublime expression. Nothing to our mind can be worse than "where the Almighty's Form glasses itself &c.—" The one word "Form" is destructive, in its gross materialism, alike of natural Poetry and natural Religion. If it be not, show us we are wrong, and henceforth we shall be mute for ever. "In all time, calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm," is poor and prosaic; and "or storm," a pitiable platitude after "in tempests." And the conversion of a Mirror into a Throne—of the Mirror too in which the Almighty's "Form glasses itself," into the Throne of the "Invisible"—is a fatal contradiction, proving the utter want of that possession of soul by one awful thought which was here demanded, and without which the whole stanza becomes but a mere collocation and hubbub of big-sounding words. "Even from out thy slime, the monsters of the deep are made," is violently jammed in between lines that have no sort of connexion with it, and introduces a thought which, whether consistent with true Philosophy or abhorrent from it, breaks in upon the whole course of contemplation, such as it is,—to say nothing of the extreme poverty of language shown in the use of such words as "monsters of the deep" made out of the slime of the sea.