extracting the imaginative element from the barest and simplest details.
And, like him, he sometimes sets before us, mere dry inventories or
invoices, instead of such poetical catalogues as Homer gives of ships,
and Milton of devils. It is remarkable that Falconer never shines at all
except when he is describing ships or sea scenery.

"His path is on the mountain waves,
His home is on the deep."


No words in Scripture are so strange to him as these, "There shall be no
more sea." The course of his voyage in the Shipwreck, brings him past
lands the most famous in the ancient world for arts and arms, for
philosophy, patriotism, and poetry. And sore does he labour to lash
himself into inspiration as he apostrophizes them; but in vain--the
result is little else than furious feebleness and stilted bombast. But
when he returns to the element, the impatient, irregular, changeful,
treacherous, terrible ocean--and watches the night, winged with black
storm and red lightning, sinking down over the Mediterranean, and the
devoted bark which is helplessly struggling with its billows, then his
blood rises, his verse heaves, and hurries on, and you see the full-born
poet--

"High o'er the poop the audacious seas aspire,
Uproll'd in hills of fluctuating fire:
With labouring throes she rolls on either side,
And dips her gunnells in the yawning tide.
Her joints unhinged in palsied langour play,
As ice-flakes part beneath the noontide ray;
The gale howls doleful through the blocks and shrouds,