and so on.  Superb, is it not?  And yet that noble strain of music gives us no true picture of our dear, commonplace, terrible sea; it reminds us rather of some gaudy canvas painted for the theatre.  The lines are glorious, the sense of movement and swing is conveyed, and yet—­and yet it is not the sea.  We fancy that only the prose-poets truly succeed; and the chief of them all—­the matchless Mr. Clark Russell—­gets his most moving effects by portraying the commonplace aspects of the water in a way that reminds people of things which they noticed but failed to admire promptly.  Mr. Russell’s gospel is plain enough; he watches minutely, and there is not a flaw of wind or a cross-drift of spray that does not offer some new emotion to his quick and sensitive soul.

I want all those who are now dwelling amid the shrewd sweetness of the sea-air to learn how to gain simple pleasure from gazing on the incessant changes that mark the face of the sea.  The entertainment is so cheap, so fruitful of lovely thought, so exhilarating, that I can hardly keep my patience when I see those wretched men who carry a newspaper to the beach on a glad summer morning, and yawn in the face of the Divine spectacle of wave and cloud and limpid sky.  Let no one think that I picture the sea as always gladsome.  Ah, no!  I have seen too much of storm and stress for that.  On one awful night long ago, I waited for hours watching waves that reared and thundered as if they would charge headlong through the streets of the town.  The white crests nickered like flame, and below the crests the dreadful inky bulge of each monster rolled on like doom—­like death.  Throughout the mad night of tempest the guns from many distressed vessels rang out, and I could see the violent sweep of the ships’ lights as they were hurled in wild arcs from crest to crest.  Many and many a corpse lay out on those sands in the morning; the bold, bronzed men stared with awful glassy stare at the lowering sky; the little cabin-boy clasped his fragment of wreckage as though it had been a toy, and smiled—­oh, so sweetly!—­in spite of the cruel sand that filled his dead eyes.  There was turmoil enough out at sea, for the steadily northerly drift was crossed by a violent roll from the east, and these two currents were complicated in their movement by a rush of water that came like a mill-race from the southward.  Imagine a great city tossed about by a monstrous earthquake that first dashes the streets against each other, and then flings up the ruins in vast rolls; that may give some idea of that memorable storm.  One poor, pretty girl saw her husband gallantly trying to make the harbour.  Long, long had she waited for him, and day by day had she tried to track the vessel’s course; the smart barque had gone round the Horn, and escaped from the perils of the Western Ocean in dead winter, and now she was heaving convulsively as she strove to run into harbour at home.  Right and left the grey billows hit her, and we could see her keel sometimes