—— 'the fearful usage
(Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.'
In Henry V., of 'the furrowed sea,' 'the lofty surge,' 'the inconstant billows dancing;' in Henry VI., Queen Margaret finds in the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo; in Richard III., Clarence's dream figures to us all the horrors of 'the vasty deep;' in Henry VIII., Wolsey indeed speaks of 'a sea of glory,' but also of his shipwreck thereon; in The Tempest we read of 'the never surfeited sea,' and of the 'sea-marge sterile and rocky-hard;' in the Midsummer's Night Dream, 'the sea' is 'rude,' and from it the winds 'suck up contagious fogs;' Hamlet is as 'mad as the sea and wind;' the violence of Laertes and the insurgent Danes is paralleled to an irruption of the sea, 'overpeering of his list;' in the well-known soliloquy is the expression, 'a sea of troubles,' which, in spite of Pope's suggested and tasteless emendation, commentators have shewn to have been used proverbially by the Greeks, and more than once by Æschylus and Menander. Still, Shakspeare, again like Horace, was not insensible to the merits of sea-air in a sanitary point of view. Dionyza, meditating Marina's murder, bids her take what the Brighton doctor's call 'a constitutional' by the sea-side, adding that—
—— 'the air is quick there,
Piercing and sharpens well the stomach.'
As to Burns, his most fervent admirer can scarcely complain when we involve him in the censure to which we have already subjected Horace and Shakspeare. He, too, writes about the sea in such a fashion, that we should hardly have suspected, what is true, that he was born almost within hearing of its waves; that much of his life was passed on its shores or near them, and that at a time of life when external objects most vividly impress themselves on the senses, and exercise the largest influence on the taste.
The genius of 'Old Coila,' in sketching the poet's early life, says—
'I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar;'
but few tokens of this 'delight' are to be observed in his poetry. He has, indeed, his allusions to 'tumbling billows' and 'surging foam;' to southern climes where 'wild-meeting oceans boil;' to 'life's rough ocean' and 'life's stormy main;' to 'hard-blowing gales;' to the 'raging sea,' 'raging billows,' 'boundless oceans roaring wide,' and the like; but these are the stock-metaphors of every poet, and would be familiar to him even had he never overpassed the frontiers of Bohemia.
One sea-picture, and one alone, is to be found in Burns, and this, it is freely admitted, is exquisite:
'Behold the hour, the boat arrive;
Thou goest, thou darling of my heart!
Severed from thee, can I survive?
But fate has willed, and we must part.
I'll often greet this surging swell,
Yon distant isle will often hail:
E'en here I took the last farewell;
There latest marked her vanished sail.
Along the solitary shore,
While flitting sea-fowl round me cry,
Across the rolling, dashing roar,
I'll westward turn my wistful eye:
Happy thou Indian grove, I'll say,
Where now my Nancy's path may be!
While through thy sweets she loves to stray,
Oh! tell me, does she muse on me?'