from his story, to have had a special craving for the sea. Perhaps
his early sojourn on the low sandhills of the Philistine shore, as
he watched the tideless Mediterranean, rolling and breaking for ever
upon the same beach, had taught him to say with the old prophet as
he thought of the wicked and still half idolatrous cities of the
Philistine shore, "Fear ye not? saith the Lord; Will ye not tremble
at my presence who have placed the sand for the bound of the sea,
for a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it? And though the
waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they
roar, yet can they not pass over. But this people has a revolted
and rebellious heart, they are revolted and gone." Perhaps again,
looking down from the sunny Sicilian cliffs of Taormino, or through
the pine-clad gulfs and gullies of the Cypriote hills upon the blue
Mediterranean below,


"And watching from his mountain wall
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawl,"


he had enjoyed and profited by all those images which that sight has
called up in so many minds before and since. To him it may be, as
to the Psalmist, the storm-swept sea pictured the instability of
mortal things, while secure upon his cliff he said with the
Psalmist, "The Lord hath set my feet upon a rock, and ordered my
goings;" and again, "The wicked are like a troubled sea, casting up
mire and dirt." Often, again, looking upon that far horizon, must
his soul have been drawn, as many a soul has been drawn since, to
it, and beyond it, as it were into a region of boundless freedom and
perfect peace, while he said again with David, "Oh that I had wings