piping such thin feebleness as

"The blue, the fresh, the ever free!"

To do that required a man whose acquaintance with the deep was limited
to a view of it from an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. Even
frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign of The Ship and
Turtle will not enable one to write sea poetry.

Considering the actual facts, there is something weird in the statement,

I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be.

The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth of an imagined sailor,
but they are none the less diverting. The stanza containing the distich
ends with a striking piece of realism:

If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

This is the course of action usually pursued by sailors during a gale.
The first or second mate goes around and tucks them up comfortably, each
in his hammock, and serves them out an extra ration of grog after the
storm is over.

Barry Cornwall must have had an exceptionally winning personality,
for he drew to him the friendship of men as differently constituted as
Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. He was liked by the best of
his time, from Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, who caught a