Either my head swims, or the cabin is getting circular! I shall roll about in it like a bolus in its box! If I am not merely giddy, I am already as spherical as the earth; a little flatted, or so, that is, towards the poles. What a horrible rough calm! I will down on my knees, if I have knees, and with clasped hands, if hands remain to me, pray, beg, and supplicate for a dismal storm to batter me into shape again, though it be but nine-bobble-square! I get more and more candid and communicative every moment. I can keep nothing to myself: you shall have my whole heart. I abhor, loathe, execrate, the sea! If I could throw up my hat, my cry would be “Land for ever!” A fico for Tom Tough! Down with Duncan Howe, and Jervis! No Dibdin! If ever I get ashore, able to chalk upon a wall, you shall read--Ask for Stoke Pogis! Try Lupton Parva! If ever I get to a dry desk again, to write verse upon,--and the poetry of the ocean is all on the land, its prose only upon the sea, you shall have a rare new melody, published by Power, to some such strain as this:-- The sea! the D----! The terrible horrible sea! The stormy, tumbling, Qualmy-jumbling, Spirit-humbling, Shingle-stumbling, Sea-weed fumbling, Wearing, crumbling, Mischief-mumbling, Growling, grumbling, Like thunder far off rumbling-- -- That last line halteth in its feet, as well it may, when the poet cannot keep his legs. Oh! it is well for Cornwall, born perchance “with one foot on sea and one foot on shore” at the Land’s End,--I have seen a picture of it by Turner, a bare bleak rocky promontory, with some nineteen gulls and cormorants sitting thereon, each with its tail turned contemptuously towards the barren granite, feldspar, and like sordid soils which there represent land.--It is well enough for him to chaunt laudations of the briny element, and cry up those amphibia, his first cousins almost, the Nereids and Tritons. Or it may become those others, born in a berth, and christened in brine, with Neptune for sponsor, to sing slightingly of the dry ground, on which they cannot claim even a parish. But my nativity was otherwise cast--I am a grass lamb, yeaned on the green sward--oh sweet sweet sweet Cropton-le-Moor, down in dear dear Wiltshire! [Illustration: “HOW ARE YOU OFF FOR MONEY?” “WHY I’M OFF WITH ALL MY MASTER’S.”]