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 sails, (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