f
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 AEschylus 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,