s, (the Levant sails not
being of "_coarse canvass_," but of white cotton,) skimming along as
quickly, but less safely than the sea-mews which hovered over them;
their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the
distance, their crowded succession, their _littleness_, as contending
with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's _teak_
timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their
motion, all struck me as something far more "poetical" than the mere
broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly
have been without them.

The Euxine is a noble sea to look upon, and the port of
Constantinople the most beautiful of harbours, and yet I cannot but
think that the twenty sail of the line, some of one hundred and forty
guns, rendered it more "poetical" by day in the sun, and by night
perhaps still more, for the Turks illuminate their vessels of war in
a manner the most picturesque, and yet all this is _artificial_. As
for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades--I stood by the broken
altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them--I felt all the
"_poetry_" of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea;
but would not that "poetry" have been heightened by the _Argo_? It
was so even by the appearance of any merchant vessel arriving from
Odessa. But Mr. Bowles says, "Why bring your ship off the stocks?"
for no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be
launched. The water, &c. undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical
associations, but it does not _make_ them; and the ship amply repays
the obligation: they aid each other; the water is more poetical with
the ship--the ship less so without the water. But even a ship laid up
in dock, is a grand and a poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel
upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a "poetical" object, (and
Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washing tub and a blind boy, may
tell you so as well as I,) whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken
water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet
lately published.

What makes the poetry in the image of the "_marble waste of Tadmor_,"
or Grainger's "Ode to Solitude," so much admired by Johnson? Is it
the "_marble_" or the "_waste,_" the _artificial_ or the _natural_
object? The "waste" is like all other _wastes_; but the "_marble_" of
Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the who