s and
streamers,"--"blue bunting," and "coarse canvass," and "tall poles."
So they are; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is
grass, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much
poesy.

Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at
least upon a sea-piece. Did any painter ever paint the sea _only_,
without the addition of a ship, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is
the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical
object, with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing
monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship? or, in the poem of
the Shipwreck, is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both
_much_ undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for
the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in
itself was never esteemed a high order of that art.

I look upon myself as entitled to talk of naval matters, at least to
poets:--with the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and Southey,
perhaps, who have been voyagers, I have _swam_ more miles than all
the rest of them together now living ever _sailed_, and have lived
for months and months on shipboard; and, during the whole period of
my life abroad, have scarcely ever passed a month out of sight of the
ocean: besides being brought up from two years till ten on the brink
of it. I recollect, when anchored off Cape Sigeum in 1810, in an
English frigate, a violent squall coming on at sunset, so violent as
to make us imagine that the ship would part cable, or drive from her
anchorage. Mr. Hobhouse and myself, and some officers, had been up
the Dardanelles to Abydos, and were just returned in time. The aspect
of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea
being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation
intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the
tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations
of the time. But what seemed the most "_poetical_" of all at the
moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish
craft, which were obliged to "cut and run" before the wind, from
their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some
for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these
little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now
appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of
night, with their peculiarly _white_ sail