AT THE SEASIDE. I'J 



did their fathers. Other generations saw the sea for the first 

 time when the mind was formed. Then they could register 

 their feelings as they called Thalatta ! Thalatta ! Thus in 

 Keble's case it was not until he was twenty, and had taken his 

 degree, that he first caught sight of the sea. Yet this mature 

 vision had its drawbacks. Childhood, and especially boyhood, 

 lost that sense of vastness and power which the sea confers, 

 and the most critical periods for budding genius missed in con- 

 sequence the mental stimulus which thus accrues. A certain 

 feebleness of language, a falling short of that grandeur of senti- 

 ment which marks the greatest poets, may be noticed in Keble's 

 verses, and these defects may probably be attributed in great 

 measure to this want of sea influences. Contrast (of course, in 

 style only) the flights of Byron's poetry, that 



" Eagle with both grappling feet still hot 

 From Zeus's thunder," 



with the polish and glow of The Christian Year. The differ- 

 ence is at once apparent. The one is a rush of imaginative 

 vigour which will not be denied vent, and bursts through all 

 barriers ; the other rolls obediently between well-ordered banks. 

 The same feature is discernible in the Laureate's poetry, the 

 outcome of early Lincolnshire impressions, where the sea is 

 what the ancients would have called a sea that is no sea, a far- 

 off power shrouded half the year in fogs and gloom. The only 

 influence to be named together with the sea is the neighbour- 

 hood of mountains. The glow of aerial colour which is con- 

 stantly flitting over them reproduces in great measure to a keen 

 perception the perpetual motion and change of the sea. The 

 world's greatest poets have fed their imagination on both. 



Yet the first sight of the sea in childhood is none the less an 

 epoch in existence if its stirrings of the soul cannot be recalled. 

 The rapid locomotion that took us to it, the emancipation 

 from lessons and the irksome regularities of home life, the sense 



