POETRY AND IMAGINATION 



and pay us to the uttermost for all the pleasing passages 



of our lives past.' And again : ' For myself, if I have 



in anything served my country, and prized it before my 



private; the general acceptation can yield me no other 



profit at this time than doth a fair sunshine day to a 



seaman after shipwrack, and the contrary no other harm 



than an outragious tempest after the port attained.' 



Images like these, rising to the memory when the thought His habitual 



is most spontaneous and sincere, speak to the habitual °^^ 



workings of the mind, and are more convincing than 



the most elaborate descriptive sea-piece. 



Though he was inland bred, it is certain that Shake- Shakespeare 

 speare knew and loved the sea. The handling of the 

 ship in the Tempest^ and the talk of the sailors in the 

 storm-scene of Pericles have excited the admiration of 

 experienced judges. The single grave charge brought 

 against his competence as a navigator is based on the 

 two allusions in the Tempest to the 'glasses' formerly 

 used as a measure of time at sea, and now superseded 

 by bells. From a comparison of these two passages it His single 

 seems that Shakespeare believed that the glasses measured 

 hours, whereas they measured half-hours.-^ He could not 



^ The passages are: Act I. Sc. ii. 1. 240, where, just after the 

 wreck, Prospero asks the time ; 



Ariel. * Past the mid season.' 



Prospero. *At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six and now 

 Must by us both be spent most preciously,' 



and Act V. 1. 223, at the close of the play, where the Boatswain 

 reports : 



^ Our ship. 

 Which but three glasses since we gave out split, 

 Is tight, and yare, and bravely rigged, as when 

 We first put out to sea.' 

 There is a similar error in JlPs Well that Ends Well, Act II. Sc. i. 



109 



