"Alas!" these pilgrims said,

"For the living and the dead

For fortune's cruelty, for love's sure cross,

For the wrecks of land and sea.

But, howe'er it came to thee,

Thine, stranger, is life's last and heaviest loss."

THE SEA.

M. J. MICHELET.

THE imaginative Orientals call the sea the Night of the Depths. In all the antique tongues from India to Ireland, the synonymous or analogous name of the sea is either Night or Desert.

Descend to even a slight depth in the sea and the beauty and brilliancy of the upper light are lost; you enter into a persistent twilight and misty and half-lurid haze; a little lower and even that sinister and eldritch twilight is lost, and all around you is night, showing nothing, but suggest-. ing everything that darkness-hand-maiden of terrible fancy can suggest. Above, below, all around, darkness, utter darkness, save when, from time to time, the swift and gracefully terrible motion of some passing monster of the deep makes "darkness visible" for a brief moment and then that passing gleam leaves you in darkness more dense, more utter, more terrible than ever. Immense in its extent, enormous in its depth, that mass of waters which covers the greater part of our globe scems in truth a great world of shadows and of gloom. And it is that which above all at once fascinates and intimidates us. Darkness and Fear! Twin sisters, they! In the early day, the at

once timid and unreasoning childhood of our race, men imagined that where no Light was neither could there be Life; that in the unfathomed depths there was a black, lifeless, soundless Chaos; above, naught but water and gloom; beneath, sand and shells, the bones of the wrecked mariner, the rich wares of the far-off, ruined, and vainly bewailing merchant-those sad treasures of that "ever-receiving and never-restoring treasury-the Sea."

Opaque, heavy, mighty, merciless, your sea is a liquid Polyphemus, a blind giant that cares not, reasons not, feels not, but hits a terribly hard blow. Not a nation upon the earth but has its tales and traditions of the sea. Homer and the Arabian Nights have handed down to us a goodly number of those frightful legends of shoals, of tempests, and of calms no less murderous than tempests-those calms during which the hardiest sailor agonizes, moans, loses all courage and all hope in the tortures of the hours, days, and even weeks-heaving upward and sinking downward, but never progressing a cable's length.

The name given to the great African desert-The Abode of Terror—may be justly transferred to the sea. The boldest sailors, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the conquering Arabs who aspired to grasp the whole world, lured by what they heard of the Hesperides and the land of gold, sailed out of the Mediterranean to the wide ocean, but soon were glad to seek their port again. The gloomy line eternally covered with clouds and mist which they found keeping their stern watch intimidated them. They lay to; they hesitated; from man to man ran the murmur, "It is the Sea of Darkness," and then back went they to port, and there told to wondering landsmen what wonders they had. seen and what horrors they had imagined. Woe to him who shall persist in his sacrilegious espionage of that dread

region! On one of those weird and far isles stands a sternly threatening Colossus whose menace is, "Thus far thou hast come; farther thou shalt not go!"

The sublimity of the early navigators lay in their blind courage and desperate resolution. They knew but little of the sea, and of the heavens they knew still less; the compass their only instructor and their only reliance, they dared the most alarming phenomena without being able even to guess at their causes. They had none of our instruments which speak to us so plainly and so unmistakably. They went blindfolded towards, and fearlessly into, the uttermost darkness. They themselves confess that they feared, but also that they would not yield. The sea's tempests; the air's whirlwinds and waterspouts; the tragic dialogues of those two occans, air and water; the striking and, not so long since, ominous phenomena of the Aurora Borealis, all this strange and wild phantasmagoria seemed to them the fury of irritated nature, a veritable strife of demons against which men could dare all-as they did— but could do what they also did nothing.

A great age, a Titanic age, the nineteenth century, has coolly, intelligently, and sternly noted all those phenomena which the old navigators braved but did not examine. In this century it is that we for the first time have dared to look the Tempest squarely, fearlessly, and scrutinizingly in the eyes. Its premonitory symptoms, its characteristics, its results, each and all have been calmly watched, carefully and systematically registered. From that registration naturally comes explanation and generalization, and thence the grand, bold, and, as our not very distant ancestors would have said, impious system-the Law of Storms!

So! What we took-what we in the old, bold, but blind day took for matter of caprice is really, after all, reduciblo

to a system, obedient to a law! So! Then those terrible facts that made the brain swim and the heart quail, because fighting shadows and walking in darkness,-so! then those terrible facts have a certain regularity of occurrence, and the seaman, resolute and strong, calmly considers whether he cannot oppose to those regular attacks a defence no less regular.

This is truly sublime. The Tempest is not abolished, but ignorance, bewilderment, that terrible bewilderment born of danger and darkness, are abolished. At least if the seaman of the present day perish, he can know the why and wherefore. Great is the safeguard of calm, clear presence of mind with soul and intellect unruffled and resigned to whatever may be the effect of the great divine laws of the world, which at the expense of a few shipwrecks produce Safety and Equilibrium.

"THE REVENGE:" A BALLAD OF THE FLEET.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

I.

AT Flores, in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay,

And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:
'Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!"
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: "Fore God I am no coward;
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,
And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-three?"

II.

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: "I know you are no coward;
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.

But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.

I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard, To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain."

III.

So Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day,
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;

But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land
Very carefully and slow,

Men of Bideford in Devon,

And we laid them on the ballast down below;

For we brought them all aboard,

And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain, To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

IV.

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,
And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,
With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.

There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be set.'

"

And Sir Richard said again: "We be all good English men.
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
For I never turned my back upon Don or devil yet."

V.

Sir Richard spoke and he laughed, and we roared a hurrah, and sọ
The little "Revenge" ran on sheer into the heart of the foe,
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;
For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,
And the little "Revenge" ran on through the long sca lane between.

VI.

Thousands of their soldiers looked down from their decks and laughed, Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft

Running on and on, till delayed

By their mountain-like "San Philip" that, of fifteen hundred tons, And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns, Took the breath from our sails, and we stayed.