ornwall fell short of filling the role; he got no further than
the composing of brief disconnected scenes and scraps of soliloquies,
and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for which the stage had no use. His
chief claim to recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the dramatic
studies, his attitude is nearly always affected. He studiously strives
to reproduce the form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Londoner,
he naturally sings much of rural English life, but his England is the
England of two or three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say about
the "falcon," but the poor bird has the air of beating fatigued wings
against the bookshelves of a well-furnished library! This well-furnished
library was--if I may be pardoned a mixed image--the rock on which Barry
Cornwall split. He did not look into his own heart, and write: he looked
into his books.

A poet need not confine himself to his individual experiences; the world
is all before him where to choose; but there are subjects which he had
better not handle unless he have some personal knowledge of them. The
sea is one of these. The man who sang,

The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, _the ever free!_

(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should never
have permitted himself to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of
Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularly
vapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever
laid eyes on any piece of water wider than the Thames at Greenwich, and
in looking over Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not so much
surprised as amused to learn that he was never out of sight of land
in the whole course of his existence. It is to be said of him more
positively than the captain of the Pinafore said it of himself, that he
was hardly ever sick at sea.

Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the ocean in all its protean moods,
piping such thin feebleness as

"The blue, the fresh, the ever free!"

To do that required a man whose acquaintance with the deep was limited
to a view of it from an upper window at Margate or Scarborough. Even
frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign of The Ship and
Turtle will not enable one to write sea poetry.

Considering the actual facts, there is something weird in the statement,

I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be.

The words, to be sure, are placed in the mo