One great spectacle in nature alone, seems strangely to have lost its fascination upon our poetess--she never kindled to the sea. She seemed to view it as the image only of desolation and of ruin; to have associated it only with tempests and wreck, and have seen in it only the harmless waste of troubled waters. More than once she adopts a scriptural phrase--"And there shall be no more sea," as an expression of singular joy and congratulation. We question whether a single reader of her poems has ever felt the force of the expression as she did. The sea, next to the sky, is the grandest and most beautiful thing given to the eyes of man. But, by some perverse association, she never saw it in its natural beauty and sublimity, but looked at it always as the emblem of ruthless and destroying power. In _The Last Song of Sappho_, it is singular how much more the dread sea, into which Sappho is about to fling herself, possesses her imagination than the moral tempest within of that hapless poetess:-- Sound on, thou dark unslumbering sea! Sound in thy scorn and pride! I ask not, _alien world_, from thee What my own kindred earth has still denied. . . . . . Yet glory's light hath touched my name, The laurel-wreath is mine-- With a lone heart, a weary frame, O restless deep! I come to make them thine! Give to that crown, that burning crown, Place in thy darkest hold! Bury my anguish, my renown, With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold. And with what an indignant voice, and with what a series of harshest epithets, does she call upon the sea to deliver up its human prey, in the fine spirited poem, called-- THE TREASURES OF THE DEEP. What hidest thou in thy treasure-caves and cells, Thou hollow-sounding and mysterious main? Pale glistening pearls and rainbow-coloured shells, Bright things which gleam unrecked of and in vain! Keep, keep thy riches, melancholy sea! We ask not such from thee. Yet more, the depths have more!--what wealth untold, Far down, and shining through their stillness, lies! Thou hast the starry gems, the burning gold, Torn from ten thousand royal Argosies! Sweep o'er thy spoils, thou wild and wrathful main! Earth claims not _these_ again. Yet more, the depths have more!--thy waves have rolled Above the cities of a world gone by! Sand hath filled up the palaces of old, Sea-weed o'ergrown the halls of revelry-- Dash o'er them, ocean! in thy scornful play! Man yields them to decay. Yet more! the billows and the depths have more! High hearts and brave are gathered to thy breast! They hear not now the booming waters roar, The battle-thunders will not break their rest. Keep thy red gold and gems, thou stormy grave! Give back the true and brave.