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I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or other of the Uies. o these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in abundance, upon the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin trives to wheedle me on three or four seasons to a watering place. Old attats g to her in spite of experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary pe Hastings -- and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and many circumstances bio make it the most agreeable holyday of my life. We had her of us seen the sea, and we had never been from home so long together in pany.I fet thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weatherbeaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough aodation -- ill exged for the foppery and fresh-water niess of the modern steam-packet? To the winds and waves thou ittedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of heaven thou we swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patiehy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of o with sulphureous smoke -- a great sea-chimera, eying and furnag the deep; or liker to that fire-god parg up Sder.
I fet thy ho, yet slender crew, with their coy relut responses (yet to the suppression of anything like pt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement? `Specially I fet thee, thou happy medium, thou shade e between us and them, ciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, fortable ambassador between sea and land whose sailor-trowsers did not more vingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter aprohem, with thy -fingered practi thy ary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture heretofore -- a master cook of Eastcheap? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, ariner, attendant, chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations -- not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the oer-washing billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowiher) how did thy offiinisterings, still catering for our fort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial versation, alleviate the closeness and the fi of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little !
With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger, whose discourse iy might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish plexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you swallow at a time -- the `nibbling pickpockets of your patience -- but one who itted dht, day-light depredations upon his neighbours faith. He did not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty thh-paced liar, and plu oo the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his pany. Not many riot many wise, or learned, posed at that time the on stowage of a Margate packet~ We were, I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied~ There might be an exception or two among us, but I s to make any invidious distins among such a jolly, panionable ships pany, as those were whom I sailed with. Something too must he ceded to the Genius Loci. Had the fide<bdo></bdo>nt fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with oher element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated from thy memory much of his wild fablings; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had been Aid-de-camp (among other rare acts and fortuo a Persian prince, and at one blow had stri off the head of the King of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the Princes daughter. I fet what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, bining with the loss of his sort, was the reason of his quitting Persia; but with the rapidity of a magi he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the fidence of great ladies. There was some story of a Princess -- Elizabeth, if I remember -- having intrusted to his care araordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion -- but as I am not certain of the name or circumsta this distance of time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in private. I ot call to mind half his pleasant wonders but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were not unon in some parts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the "ignorant present." But when (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his ret reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as "the Colossus iion had beeroyed long since:" to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to cede thus much, that "the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only oppositio with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, or he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more placy than ever, firmed, as it were, by the extreme dour of that cession. With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, whie of our own pany (havihe voyage before) immediately reising, and pointing out to us, was s<q>藏书网</q>idered by us as no ordinary seaman.
All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different character. It was a lad, appare<u></u>ntly very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile: and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by act, and they seemed not to him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring and when some of us pulled out our private stores -- our eat and our salads -- he produone, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintah him, which he seemed her to court nor dee, we learhat he was going tate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, "he had no friends." These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the sea, cooperating with youth, and a sense of holydays, and out-of-door adveo me -- that had bee up in populous cities for many months before, have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon.
Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwele parisons), if I endeavour to at for the dissatisfa which I have heard so many persons fess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given -- referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preceptions of them -- scarcely goes deep enough into the questiohe same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression: enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disappoi. -- Is it not, that iter we had exited to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain passable by the eye, but all the sea at oHE ENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH! I do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He es to it for the first time -- all that he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life, -- all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romand poetry; crowding their images, aing straributes from expectation. -- He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast tis it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner
For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
Incessant lab round the stormy Cape;
of fatal rocks, and the "still-vexed Bermoothes;" of great whirlpools, and the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the u depths: of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible oh --
Be but as buggs thten babes withal,
pared with the creatures in the seas entral;
of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of ented isles; of mermaids grots --
I do not assert that in sober ear he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is uhe tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with fused hints and shadows of all these; and wheual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic coast -- a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him -- what it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive eai? Or if he has e to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing parable to the vast oer-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amazement ? -- Who, in similar circumstances, has not beeed to exclaim with Charuba, in the poem of Gebir,
Is this the mighty o I -- is this all?
I love town, or try; but this detestable que Port is her. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I ot stand all day on the naked beach, watg the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island-prison. I would faiire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with s, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, aerogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the O. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair ho fishing town, and no more, it were something with a few straggling fishermens huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces bee the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only hohief. He robs nothing but the revenue, -- an abstra I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackarel boa<bdi></bdi>ts, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfa. I even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurreo watch their illicit trymen -- townsfolk or brethren perce -- whistling to the sheathing and uhing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who uhe mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a fo show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the visitants from town, that e here to say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish da these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What they want here? if they had a true relish of the o, why have they `brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these sty book-rooms -- marine libraries as they entitle them -- if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book "to read strater in ?" what are their foolish cert-rooms, if they e, as they would faihought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretention. They e, because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stockbrokers; but I have watched the better sort of them -- now and then, an ho citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their tenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, pig up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things; but, in a poor week, imagination slas: they begin to discover that cockles produo pearls, and then -- O then ! -- if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I know they have not the ce to fess it themselves) how gladly would they exge their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their aced Twiham meadows!
I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated abines of this place, enced by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy betweeo return the visit, and e up to see -- London. I must imagihem with their fishing tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would it e among
The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street.
I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-p?9９ｌib?laces. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would exge these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis.
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