The difficulty which your correspondent T. W. finds in Lord Byron's celebrated Address to the Ocean is occasioned by his having taken up a wrong notion of the construction at the first reading; and the solution of his perplexity is so obvious, when this is once pointed out, that it must have already occurred to many of your readers, and very probably, by this time, to T. W. himself. The lines that puzzle him are-- "Thy waters wasted them while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage." "What!" exclaims T. W., "The waters wasted many a tyrant? How, in the name of wonder?" How indeed! Probably more readers at once caught the sense:-- "_Thy waters_ wasted them while they were free And many _a tyrant_ since--_has wasted them_." The word "wasted" is used in a somewhat different sense in the two cases, but this is the price of the antithesis; and the result follows, that their shores _now_ obey the stranger, the slave, or the savage, as exemplified in Greece, Asia and Africa respectively. And here we may observe, that the writer in _Blackwood's Magazine_, whom T. W. quotes, and who thinks the ocean appealed to is the world's ocean, and not the Mediterranean, has been just as blind to the train of thought in the other part as T. W. in this. But in the way of doing something beyond the solution of this particular obscurity, so far as there is any, I would remark, that Byron's efforts at concentration and point not unfrequently give rise to an obscurity of this kind; which for a moment produces a perplexity that seems laughable as soon as the true sense occurs to us. For instance, on first reading these verses in the _Corsair_,-- "Be the edge sharpen'd of my boarding brand, And give its guard more room to fix my hand. This let the armourer with speed dispose; Last time, it more fatigued my arm than foes:" I exclaimed, like T. W., "What! his sword _fatigued_ his foes? What a most absurd expression! To be sure, one may imagine that when Conrad was killing his enemies one after another without stopping, they would say, What a _tiresome_ man he is! but this does not seem to be in the vein of the narration." And then, reading the passage again, and considering that the pirate complains of the guard of his sword being too narrow, I saw plainly that, with whatever damage to the rhythm, the verse was to be read-- "Last time, _it_ more fatigued my arm than _foes_" (did). My sword, by its not fitting to my hand, fatigued my arm more than all the resistance that foes could offer. I will give another example of the same kind, again taken from the Pirate. In the enthusiastic description of a ship, he says: "Who would not brave the battle-fire--the wreck-- To move the monarch of her peopled deck?"