Through vineyards from some inland bay.'

Yet about this sea, which should have kindled his imagination and
inspired his genius, this thankless bard poetises in a vein such as a
London citizen, some half-century back, might have indulged in after a
long, tedious, 'squally' voyage in an overladen Margate hoy.

No such spirit possessed him as that which dictated poor Campbell's
noble apostrophe to the glorious 'world of waters:'

---- 'Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine;
The eagle's vision cannot take it in;
The lightning's glance, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it, like a wearied bird:
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.'

Horace, indeed, has sung the praises of Tarentum--that beautiful
maritime city of the Calabrian Gulf, whose attractions were such as to
make _the delights of Tarentum_ a common proverbial expression. But
what were these delights as celebrated by our poet?--the perfection of
its honey, the excellence of its olives, the abundance of its grapes,
its lengthened spring and temperate winter. For these, its merits, did
Horace prefer, as he tells us, Tarentum to every other spot on the
wide earth--his beloved Tibur only and ever excepted. In truth, Horace
valued and visited the sea-side only in winter, and then simply
because its climate was milder than that to be met with inland, and