irresponsible power, its sullen anger and destroying rage,combining to excite in him a sense of antipathy to it, as to a thing which had done him irreparable wrong. Another expert traveller and voluminous author says emphatically of the sea, "I hate it. I have a dread for it, as Mrs. Hemans had." He avows that to him it is simply a Monster, cruel, capricious, remorseless, rapacious, insatiable, deceitful; sullenly unwilling to disgorge its treasures; mockingly refusing to give up its dead, though "it must, and shall, some day, the sea." Rousseau, who, as Mr. John Morley observes, always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in men, and who therefore "liked rivulets better than rivers,”—could not bear the sight of the sea, whose infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him with melancholy.* Lord Cockburn tells us of his friend Jeffrey, that, of all strong-minded men, there never was one who from what he deemed a just estimate of its dangers, but in truth from mere nervous horror, recoiled from it with such sincerity of aversion. Jeffrey's diary of his voyage to America (in 1813) abounds in disrespectful terms touching the amazing narrowness and paltriness of the "boundless" ocean. "There is nothing so ugly or mean as the sea in roughish weather: the circuit very narrow, the elevations paltry, and all the forms ungraceful and ignoble." A real gale of wind comes, and he professes to have felt no alarm, but “never saw an uglier scene; and, what is worse, ugly, without being sublime or terrible." He owns to feeling "a spite at the sea, for I cannot bring myself to think or speak of it without a certain contempt, as well as dislike." He would probably have adopted ex animo, or con amore, the opinion of that later voyager across the same waters, Mr. Mark Tapley, who par

* Vivid as are the pictures, in his Confessions, of the Venetian episode of his chequered life, he makes no mention in them of his first sight of the sea-nor, adds his English biographer, "does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of it with melancholy."-Morley's Rousseau, i., IOI.

It

ticularly pronounced the sea "as nonsensical a thing as anything going. It never knows what to do with itself. hasn't got no employment for its mind, and is always in a state of vacancy. Like them Polar bears in the wild-beast shows as is constantly a nodding their heads from side to side, it never can be quiet. Which is entirely owing to its uncommon stupidity." One of the ablest of recent dissertators on the subject avows himself prompt to agree with the philosopher who wished that he could have been consulted at the creation of the universe-for then we might probably have had a world without an ocean. He holds it to be demonstratable that no object in nature is on the whole less beautiful than the sea that it is monotonous and singularly commonplace, excepting always the cases in which it serves as an admirable background to fine coast scenery. "But why there should be so much sea out of sight of land is a problem which to our present understandings must be abandoned as inscrutable." So again an anonymous discourser upon long voyages takes it to be undeniable that the sea loses nine-tenths of its poetry and impressiveness while you are living on it: you think of the noble things that poets have written about it, of its gigantic irrepressible impulses, its tidal forces, its vast unchangeableness; that time writes no wrinkle on its azure brow, is an exquisitely graceful reflection as one sits on a grassy beach on a day in spring, but its significance and solace fade away into the most dismal distance in a gale of wind. Victor Hugo is said to be the only great poet who has thoroughly understood the "vile, insensate, and absolutely brutal ferocity" of the sea; a monster so thoroughly irrational, so incurably deaf and blind, so unconditionally without purpose or aim. "The sensations of most men in their first rough blow are probably those of pure fear. But by the second and third blow fear retreats an inch or two to make way for a fragment of contempt. One begins to think a little meanly of the ocean, which, in spite of all its fury and its hundreds of miles of tumbling waters, and with the winds for its auxiliaries, still is thoroughly mastered by a clever toy of wood and iron. You

feel that your raging foe has a good deal of the mere bully in him, after all." On the other hand, it has been well said that the child's first consciousness of the greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea-so charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most awful of possible destroyers. By it the child is first and most abidingly impressed with the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a mysterious danger, and, above all, the sense of a mysterious power. Lamartine says that if prayer was not born with man himself, it must have been on the sea that it was invented, by men left alone with their thoughts and their feebleness; in presence of that abyss of the firmament, where their view is lost in confusion, and of that abyss of the sea, from which only a frail plank divides them; in hearing the roar of the ocean, when it growls, hisses, howls, and bellows, like the voices of a thousand wild beasts. De Quincey speaks of the sea as often peopled, amidst its ravings, with what seem innumerable human voices-such voices, or as ominous, as what were heard by Kubla Khan, "ancestral voices prophesying war;" and he refers to the shapes of fear, or shapes of beauty not less awful, that doubtless are seen at times upon the waves by the diseased eye of the sailor, in other cases besides the somewhat rare one of calenture. For "all sailors, it is notorious, are superstitious," partly, it is inferred, from looking out so much upon the wilderness of waters, empty of all human life, and mighty solitudes are generally fear-haunted and fearpeopled. In his treatise on Modern Superstition the same writer adverts to Wordsworth's notice of that ancient awe for the sea and its tremendous secrets, which, he predicts, will never become obsolete: no excess of nautical skill will ever perfectly disenchant the great abyss from its terrors. In this world, to his thinking, there are two mighty forms of perfect solitude-the ocean and the desert: the wilderness of the barren sands, and the wilderness of the barren waters. "Both are the parents of inevitable superstitions-of terrors solemn, ineradicable, eternal."

Of all the objects he had ever seen, there was none, said

Addison, which affected his imagination so much as did the sea. He could not gaze on the heavings of that prodigious bulk of waters, even in a calm, without what he calls "a very pleasing astonishment;" but when it was worked up in a tempest, so that the horizon on every side was nothing but foaming billows and floating mountains, he found it impossible to describe the "agreeable horror" that rises from such a prospect. A troubled ocean, he adds, to a man who sails upon it, is "the biggest object that he can see in motion," and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from a sense of the vast.

Mr. Black's winsome Princess of Thule tells the fair-haired stranger from the South, when he rails against "that perpetual and melancholy sea" amid which her lot is cast,—“ Ah, but you must not talk badly of the sea. It is our very good friend. It gives us [Borva islanders] food, and keeps many people alive.. It carries the lads away to other places, and brings them back with money in their pockets," and sometimes, interposes the objecting Southron, it smashes a few of them on the rocks, or swallows up a dozen families, and the next morning it is as smooth and fair as if nothing had happened. "But that is not the sea at all," said Sheila ; "that is the storms that will wreck the boats, and how can the sea help that? When the sea is let alone, the sea is very good to us." And so animated and prettily accentuated was Sheila's defence of her favourite, that the Southron confessed himself beaten, and vowed that never again would he, in Miss Mackenzie's presence, say anything against the sea.

In one of the least known of his miscellaneous poems, Walter Savage Landor speaks reverently, lovingly, tenderly even, of

"that unpausing sea

Which heaves with God's own image, ever pure,

And ministers in mightiness to Earth

Plenty and health and beauty and delight;

Of all created things beneath the skies

The only one that mortal may not mar.'

No one who could write this, no one who can go along with the

writer of it, feel as he felt, and think as he thought, can accept as probable or plausible, without something of a revolting intellect and an aching heart, a literal, or literally commonplace, interpretation of the text which announces, for the better life and the new creation, NO MORE SEA.

A

XLI.

NO MORE PAIN.

REVELATION xxi. 4.

NEW heaven and a new earth, the seer of Patmos beheld

in his apocalyptic visions; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. But other negative characteristics there were, also, in the new creation, due to Him who made all things new. Conspicuous by its absence, in this cosmic regeneration, was a mystery deeper than the sea,—the mystery of pain. In this new world, in the holy city, new Jerusalem, God should be very present with His people, and should wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither should there be any more pain.

But

St. Paul had declared the whole creation, or every creature, to be groaning and travailing in pain together until now. the Patmos vision was of a new creation, where there should be no room for the cry, "Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable?" -no cause for the lament, "Much pain is in all loins, and the faces of them all gather blackness." The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death; and the charter of the holy city, New Jerusalem, gives formal assurance to its denizens, the citizens of no mean city, that there shall be no more death. For the former things are passed away; and with death are passed away the concomitants and foreshadowers of death : neither sorrow nor crying is to be heard in that better land, neither shall there be any more pain.

Is all this but a wistful yearning? a sublime dream? a