friends where he was going, he replied, "he go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and had no friends." of the vast continents it washes; of its reThese pleasant, and some mournful pas-ceiving the mighty Plate, or Orellana, into sages with the first sight of the sea, co- its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of operating with youth, and a sense of holi- augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the days, and out-of-door adventure, to me mariner that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before, have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon. may For many a day, and many a dreadful night, of fatal rocks, and the "still-vexed Ber- Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons), if I endeavour to account for the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given - referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of I do not assert that in sober earnest he them scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion, an expects to be shown all these wonders at elephant, a mountain for the first time in his once,, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little faculty, which haunts him with confused mortified. The things do not fill up that hints and shadows of all these; and when space, which the idea of them seemed to take the actual object opens first upon him, seen up in his mind. But they have still a cor- (in tame weather, too, most likely) from our respondency to his first notion, and in time unromantic coasts a speck, a slip of seagrow up to it, so as to produce a very similar water, as it shows to him— what can it prove impression: enlarging themselves (if I but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive say so) upon familiarity. But the sea re-entertainment? Or if he has come to it mains a disappointment. Is it not, that in from the mouth of a river, was it much more the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, than the river widening? and, even out of I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery imagination, unavoidably) not a definite ob- horizon about him, nothing comparable to ject, as those wild beasts, or that mountain the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar compassable by the eye, but all the sea at object, seen daily without dread or amazeonce, THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE ment? - Who, in similar circumstances, has EARTH? I do not say we tell ourselves so not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, much, but the craving of the mind is to be in the poem of Gebir, satisfied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but I love town, or country; but this detestfrom description. He comes to it for the able Cinque Port is neither. I hate these first time - all that he has been reading of it scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved all his life, and that the most enthusiastic foliage from between the horrid fissures of part of life, - all he has gathered from narra- dusty innnutritious rocks; which the amateur tives of wandering seamen, what he has calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I gained from true voyages, and what he require woods, and they show me stunted cherishes as credulously from romance and coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, poetry, crowding their images, and exacting and pant for fresh streams, and inland strange tributes from expectation. He murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the thinks of the great deep, and of those who naked beach, watching the capricious hues -- 1 Is this the mighty ocean? is this all? -if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book "to read strange matter in?" what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretension. They come, because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are, mostly, as I have said, stock-brokers; but I have watched the better sort of them - now and then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It they exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows! of the sea, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of seamews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair, is easy to see it in their countenance. A honest fishing-town, and no more, it were day or two they go wandering on the something-with a few straggling fishermen's shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinkhuts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and ing them great things; but, in a poor week, with their materials filched from them, it imagination slackens: they begin to discover were something. I could abide to dwell that cockles produce no pearls, and then — with Meshech; to assort with fisher-swains, O then!-if I could interpret for the pretty and smugglers. There are, or I dream there creatures (I know they have not the courage are many of this latter occupation here. to confess it themselves) how gladly would Their faces become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue, - an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackerel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen - townsfolk or brethren perchance whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who, under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for Old England. But it is the visitants from town, that come here to say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond-perch or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What can they want here? if they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these scanty bookrooms-marine libraries as they entitle them I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return the visit, and come up to see-London. I must imagine them with their fishing- tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would it not excite among The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-Street! I am sure that no town-bred or inlandborn subjects can feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bid us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis. THE CONVALESCENT. A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflection upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams. question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him understand, that things went cross-grained in the court yester day, and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin," disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of anything but how to get better. What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration! He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapt in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only. And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw daylight curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse? If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! how kinglike he sways his pillow-tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-weep over himself. varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations. He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates-as of a thing apart from him-upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart. He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and hecause he can pour forth his feverish ejacu lations before it as unreservedly as to his lay and acted his despotic fancies - how is it bed-post. To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call: and even in the lines on that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully, for fear of rustling is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to morrow. Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him: he can just endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking "Who was it?" He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty. reduced to a common bed-room! The trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was an historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid. Hushed are those mysterious sighs - those groans - so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he, too, changed with everything else! Can this be he—this man of news—of chat— of anecdote of everything but physic - can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating party? - Pshaw ! 'tis some old woman. To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which Farewell with him all that made sickness he is served with the careless demeanour, pompous-the spell that hushed the housethe unceremonious goings in and out (slap- hold-the desert-like stillness, felt throughping of doors, or leaving them open) of the out its inmost chambers - the mute attendvery same attendants, when he is getting a ance the inquiry by looks the still softer little better and you will confess, that from delicacies of self-attention the sole and the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon it) to the elbow-chair of convalescence, is a itself-world-thoughts excluded — the man a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition. world unto himself his own theatre How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where he - What a speck is he dwindled into! In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting -an article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I; world alike; to its laws, and to its literature. but it is something hard-and the quibble, - 1 The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres, which in imagination I had spread over-for the sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself—are wasting to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my natural pretensions- the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant Essayist. SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, "did Nature to him frame, As all things but his judgment overcame; The ground of the mistake is, that men, find- he has ness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,-never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so,his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions night-mares. They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active-for to be active is to call something into act and form - but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, |