And big rain pours a deluge from the clouds.
From wintry magazines that sweep the sky,
Descending globes of hail incessant fly;
High on the masts with pale and lurid rays,
Amid the gloom portentous meteors blaze!
The ethereal dome in mournful pomp array'd,
Now buried lies beneath impervious shade,--
Now flashing round intolerable light,
Redoubles all the horrors of the night.
Such terror Sinai's trembling hill o'erspread,
When Heaven's loud trumpet sounded o'er its head.
It seem'd the wrathful angel of the wind,
Had all the horrors of the skies combined;
And here to one ill-fated ship opposed,
At once the dreadful magazine disclosed."

This is noble writing. "Deep calleth unto deep." It reminds us of Pope's
translation of that tremendous passage in the 8th Book of the Iliad,
where Jove comes forth, and darts his angry lightnings in the eyes of
the Grecians, and repels and appals their mightiest; Nestor alone, but
with his horse wounded by the dart of Paris, sustaining the divine
assault.

Lord Byron, in his letter to Bowles in defence of Pope, alludes to
Falconer's Shipwreck, and cites it in proof of the poetical use which
may be made of the works of art. But it has justly been remarked by
Hazlitt, in his very masterly reply, published in the 'London Magazine',
that the finest parts of the Shipwreck are not those in which he appears
to versify parts of his own Marine Dictionary, or in which he makes vain
efforts to describe the vestiges of Grecian grandeur, but those in