The difficulty which your correspondent T. W. finds in Lord Byron's celebrated Address to the Ocean is occasioned by his having taken up a wrong notion of the construction at the first reading; and the solution of his perplexity is so obvious, when this is once pointed out, that it must have already occurred to many of your readers, and very probably, by this time, to T. W. himself. The lines that puzzle him are—
"Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage."
"What!" exclaims T. W., "The waters wasted many a tyrant? How, in the name of wonder?" How indeed! Probably more readers at once caught the sense:—
"Thy waters wasted them while they were free And many a tyrant since—has wasted them."
The word "wasted" is used in a somewhat different sense in the two cases, but this is the price of the antithesis; and the result follows, that their shores now obey the stranger, the slave, or the savage, as exemplified in Greece, Asia and Africa respectively. And here we may observe, that the writer in Blackwood's Magazine, whom T. W. quotes, and who thinks the ocean appealed to is the world's ocean, and not the Mediterranean, has been just as blind to the train of thought in the other part as T. W. in this.
But in the way of doing something beyond the solution of this particular obscurity, so far as there is any, I would remark, that Byron's efforts at concentration and point not unfrequently give rise to an obscurity of this kind; which for a moment produces a perplexity that seems laughable as soon as the true sense occurs to us. For instance, on first reading these verses in the Corsair,—
"Be the edge sharpen'd of my boarding brand,
And give its guard more room to fix my hand.