But with redoubling force the tempests blow, And watery hills in dread succession flow. * * * * * A sea, upsurging with stupendous roll.[66] One of the most striking characteristics of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea terms. Such lines as, Reef top-sails, reef! the master calls again. The halyards and top-bow-lines soon are gone, To clue-lines and reef-tackles next they run. * * * * * Deep on her side, the reeling vessel lies: Brail up the mizzen quick! the master cries, Man the clue-garnets! let the main-sheet fly,[67] are praised as minutely accurate but it certainly needs a specialist’s training to understand them.[68] There is nothing new in Falconer’s poem except his use of realism in describing the ship’s maneuvers. The sea is, to be sure, more prominent than we have found it in preceding poems, but it is the same “desert waste,” the same “faithless deep,” the same “watery plain,” and is deformed by the typical classical storm. Strange as it may seem, it is yet true that the poets of sea-girt England were very slow in making the discovery of the ocean.[69] The main points in the eighteenth-century conception of the sea were its usefulness as a commercial highway and its destructive power in storms. This impression of irresistible force is sometimes vivid enough to result in strong phrasing, but the changing beauty, the majesty, the mysterious suggestiveness of the sea found no expression in English classical poetry. Even in the poems that mark the transition spirit the adequate word for the sea is surprisingly slow to come. In connection with the failure to understand or love the mountains or the sea we may note the avoidance of winter[70] or the conception of it as the “deformed wrong side of the year.” Lyttleton thoroughly disliked “gloomy winter’s unauspicious reign,”[71] and Pope said that its bleak prospects set his very imagination a-shivering.[72] Lady Montagu called the glistening snows a painful sight, and said that the whole country was in winter “deform’d by rains and rough with blasting winds.” The “icy, cold, depressing hand” of winter, brought in a season of privations, discomfort, and dangers. Throughout the classical period the typical phrases are “shuddering winter,” “winter’s dreary gloom,” “the sad, inverted year.” Storm and blasts “deface the year.” Hailstorms “deform the flowery spring.” Clouds “sadden the inverted year.” Winter’s “joyless reign” is a season marked by “dusky horrors.” Fierce winter desolates the year, Deserts of snow fatigue the eye, Successive tempests bloat the sky And gloomy damps oppress the soul,