FALCONER AND MARINE SCENERY, MASON, THE WARTONS, AND BEATTIE

WITH very little education, uncultivated taste, and with Pope's Homer for his model of style and verse, Falconer essayed to record his experiences as a sailor, and has produced a poem which stands absolutely alone in our poetry. The contrast between the truth and vividness of his descriptions and his vicious diction, with its cheap pomp and stilted artificiality, is sometimes startling even to ludicrousness. And yet the merits of his poem are really great: it is excellently constructed-an epic, with the conflict between man's skill and courage and the power of the terrible element in collision with it for its theme. In the first canto man musters his forces, and the crew and the ship are described; in the second, man is confronted with his adversary, and the sea and a ship's ordinary experiences on it are detailed; in the third, off Cape Colonna, battle is joined, and man has lost. All Falconer's descriptions are drawn from experience; they have, like Crabbe's, the merit of truth. He was himself the second mate of

a vessel employed in the Levant trade, and was shipwrecked in a passage from Alexandria to Venice, three only of the crew being saved. By a tragical irony the poet of the shipwreck perished by shipwreck. He sailed from England on the Aurora in September 1769. After they left the Cape nothing more was heard of her, not a vestige being found; it is supposed that she went down in the Mozambique Channel.

In selecting two or three of Falconer's descriptions, I will not mark the omissions by asterisks. Let us take first the rising and effects of a sudden squall:

But see! in confluence borne before the blast,
Clouds roll'd on cloud, the dusky moon o'ercast:
The blackening ocean curls, the winds arise,
And the dark scud in swift succession flies.
Four hours the Sun his high meridian throne
Had left, and o'er Atlantic regions shone;
Still blacker clouds, that all the skies invade,
Draw o'er his sullied orb a dismal shade:
A lowering squall obscures the southern sky,
Before whose sweeping breath the waters fly.
It comes resistless! and with foamy sweep
Upturns the whitening surface of the deep:
The clouds, with ruin pregnant, now impend,
And storm and cataracts tumultuous blend.
Deep, on her side, the reeling vessel lies:
Brail up
the mizen quick! the master cries,
Man the clue-garnets! Let the main-sheet fly !
It rends in thousand shivering shreds on high!
The main-sail, all in streaming ruins tore,
Loud flutt'ring, imitates the thunder's roar.

Canto II.

The following are from the last scene:

High o'er the poop th' audacious seas aspire,
Uproll'd in hills of fluctuating fire;

With lab'ring throes she rolls on either side,
And dips her gunnels in the yawning tide.

The gale howls doleful through the blocks and shrouds,
And big rain pours a deluge from the clouds.

In vain the cords and axes were prepar'd,
For every wave now smites the quivering yard;
High o'er the ship they throw a dreadful shade,
Then on her burst in terrible cascade;
Across the founder'd deck o'erwhelming roar,
And foaming, swelling, bound upon the shore.
Swift up the mounting billow now she flies,
Her shatter'd top half-buried in the skies.

Canto III.

Take, too, the picture of a shoal of dolphin

But now, beneath the lofty vessel's stern,
A shoal of sportive dolphins they discern
Beaming from burnish'd scales refulgent rays,
Till all the glowing ocean seems to blaze:
In curling wreaths they wanton on the tide,
Now bound aloft, now downward swiftly glide;
Awhile beneath the waves their tracks remain,
And burn in silver streams along the liquid plain.

Canto II.

Not without beauty, if of a somewhat commonplace order, is another of his marine scenes :

The sun's bright orb, declining all serene,

Now glanc'd obliquely o'er the woodland scene:

The glassy ocean hush'd forgets to roar,

But trembling murmurs on the sandy shore: