thing waste; while the line floats
home helplessly, as if disappointed; and the billows plunge more
sullenly and sadly towards the shore, as if in remorse for their dark
and reckless deed.

All is over. What shall we do now? Go home, and pray that God may have
mercy on all drowning souls? Or think what a picturesque and tragical
scene it was, and what a beautiful poem it will make, when we have
thrown it into an artistic form, and bedizened it with conceits and
analogies stolen from all heaven and earth by our own self-willed
fancy?

Elsley Vavasour--through whose spectacles, rather than with my own
eyes, I have been looking at the wreck, and to whose account, not
to mine, the metaphors and similes of the last two pages must be
laid--took the latter course; not that he was not awed, calmed, and
even humbled, as he felt how poor and petty his own troubles
were, compared with that great tragedy: but in his fatal habit of
considering all matters in heaven and earth as bricks and mortar for
the poet to build with, he considered that he had "seen enough;" as if
men were sent into the world to see and not to act; and going home too
excited to sleep, much more to go and kiss forgiveness to his sleeping
wife, sat up all night, writing "The Wreck," which may be (as the
reviewer in "The Parthenon" asserts) an exquisite poem; but I cannot
say that it is of much importance.

So the delicate genius sate that night, scribbling verses by a
warm fire, and the rough Lieutenant settled himself down in his
Mackintoshes, to sit out those weary hours on the bare rock, having
done all that he could do, and yet knowing that his duty was, not to
leave the place as long as there was a chance of saving--not a life,
for that was past all hope--but a chest of clothes, or a stick of
timber. There he settled himself, grumbling, yet faithful; and filled
up the time with sleepy maledictions against some old admiral, who
had--or had not--taken a spite to him in the West Indies thirty years
before, else he would have been a post captain by now, comfortably in
bed on board a crack frigate, instead of sitting all night out on
a rock, like an old cormorant, etc. etc. Who knows not the woes of
ancient coast-guard lieutenants?

But as it befell, Elsley Vavasour was justly punished for going home,
by losing the most "poetical" incident of the whole night.

For with the coast-guardsmen many sailors stayed. There was nothing to
be earned by staying: but