Sea Poets.
The ocean as confidant, a Laertes that can neither avoid his Hamlets nor
bid them hold their peace, is a modern invention. Byron and Shelley
discovered it; Heine took it into his confidence, and told it the story
of his loves; Wordsworth made it a moral influence; Browning loved it in
his way, but his way was not often the poet's; to Matthew Arnold it was
the voice of destiny, and its message was a message of despair; Hugo
conferred with it as with an humble friend, and uttered such lofty things
over it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with living
lyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until it
strikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret--
'Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me';
Mr. Swinburne maddens with the wind and the sounds and the scents of it,
until there passes into his verse a something of its vastness and its
vehemency, the rapture of its inspiration, the palpitating,
many-twinkling miracle of its light; Mr. William Morris has been taken
with the manner of its melancholy; while to Whitman it has been 'the
great Camerado' indeed, for it gave him that song of the brown bird
bereft of his mate in whose absence the half of him had not been told to
us.
Longfellow.
But to Longfellow alone was it given to see that stately galley which
Count Arnaldos saw; his only to hear the steersman singing that wild and
wondrous song which none that hears it can resist, and none that has
heard it may forget. Then did he learn the old monster's secret--the
word of his charm, the core of his mystery, the human note in his music,
the quality of his influence upon the heart and the mind of man; and then
did he win himself a place apart among sea poets. With the most of them
it is a case of _Ego et rex meus_: It is I and the sea, and my egoism is
as valiant and as vocal as the other's. But Longfellow is the spokesman
of a confraternity; what thrills him to utterance is the spirit of that
strange and beautiful freemasonry established as long ago as when the
first sailor steered the first keel out into the unknown, irresistible
water-world, and so established the foundations of the eternal
brotherhood of man with ocean. To him the sea is a place of mariners and
ships. In his verse the rigging creaks, the white sail fills and
crackles, there are blown smells of pine and hemp and tar; you catch the
home wind on your cheeks; and old shipmen, their eyeballs white in their
bronzed faces, with silver rings and gaudy handkerchiefs, come in and
tell you moving stories of the immemorial, incommunicable deep. He
abides in a port; he goes down to the docks, and loiters among the
galiots and brigantines, he hears the melancholy song of the chanty-men;
he sees the chips flying under the shipwright's adze; he smells the pitch
that smokes and bubbles in the caldron. And straightway he falls to
singing his variations on the ballad of Count Arnaldos; and the world
listens, for its heart beats in his song.