Byron's love for his dog, Boatswain, and the solemn inscription engraved on the stone marking the favourite's grave, are apt to be instanced as signs of the poet's rooted melancholy. But it helps us to a more correct appreciation of such feelings to remember that the cheerful-minded Scott had his favourite dog, Camp, solemnly buried in the garden at Abbotsford, the whole family standing weeping round the grave. But even more characteristically English than the attachment to horses and dogs and land, and the witness in literature to the same, is the love of the sea. The Englishman is an amphibious animal. A considerable part of the description of nature in the literature of this period is marine painting. It was an ancient tradition, gloriously maintained at this particular time, that England was the mistress of the sea; and English writers have always been the best delineators and interpreters of the sea. There is a breath of its freshness and freedom in all the best poetry of the country. To the Englishman the sea has always been the great symbol of liberty, as the Alps have been to the freedom-loving Swiss. Wordsworth exclaims with truth in one of his _Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_:-- "Two Voices are there; one is of the Sea, One of the Mountains; each a mighty voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice, They were thy chosen music, Liberty!" We understand, therefore, how it was that the long-dormant Viking spirit re-awoke in the best poets of the country during this remarkable period of English literature. In Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_ we have all the terror and horror of the sea; Campbell's _Mariners of England_ is an entrancingly melodious and manly glorification of the heroism and might of the English seamen; Byron's Vikinglike expeditions are mirrored in the exploits of Childe Harold and Don Juan; Shelley's passion for the sea and sailing lives and breathes in the billowy rhythm of his verse and in all the poems which extol wind and wave--above all others that masterpiece, the _Ode to the West Wind_.