For the English Renaissance—­for Elizabeth’s England, action and imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets held up the mirror to the voyagers.  In a sense, the cult of the sea is the oldest note in English literature.  There is not a poem in Anglo-Saxon but breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air.  To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves.  When the English settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, and coastwise sailing from port to port.  Chaucer’s shipman, almost the sole representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a coastwise trade.  But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher and Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more the ocean became the highway of our national progress and adventure, and by virtue of our shipping we became competitors for the dominion of the earth.  The rising tide of national enthusiasm and exaltation that this occasioned flooded popular literature.  The voyagers themselves wrote down the stories of their adventures; and collections of these—­Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s—­were among the most popular books of the age.  To them, indeed, we must look for the first beginnings of our modern English prose, and some of its noblest passages.  The writers, as often as not, were otherwise utterly unknown—­ship’s pursers, super-cargoes, and the like—­men without much literary craft or training, whose style is great because of the greatness of their subject, because they had no literary artifices to stand between them and the plain and direct telling of a stirring tale.  But the ferment worked outside the actual doings of the voyagers themselves, and it can be traced beyond definite allusions to them.  Allusions, indeed, are surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much as mentioned among the greater writers of the age.  None the less there is not one of them that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of the movement which he led.  New lands had been discovered, new territories opened up, wonders exposed which were perhaps only the first fruits of greater wonders to come.  Spenser makes the voyagers his warrant for his excursion into fairyland.  Some, he says, have condemned his fairy world as an idle fiction,

“But let that man with better sense advise;
 That of the world least part to us is red;
 And daily how through hardy enterprise
 Many great regions are discovered,
 Which to late age were never mentioned. 
 Who ever heard of the ‘Indian Peru’? 
 Or who in venturous vessel measured
 The Amazon, huge river, now found true? 
 Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?