My Biographer, in the Book of Gems, alludes to this voyage, and infers from some verses--“Gadzooks! must one swear to the truth of a song?”--that it sickened me of the sea. Nothing can be more unfounded. The marine terrors and disagreeables enumerated in the poem, belong to a Miss Oliver, and not to me, who regard the ocean with a natural and national partiality. Constitutionally proof against that nausea which extorts so many wave-offerings from the afflicted, I am as constant as Captain Basil Hall himself, in my regard “for the element that never tires.” Some washy fellows, it is true, _Fresh_-men from Cambridge and the like, affect to prefer river or even pond water for their aquatics--the tame ripple to the wild wave, the prose to “the poetry of motion.” But give _me_ “the multitudinous sea,” resting or rampant, with all its variable moods and changeable colouring. Methought, when pining under the _maladie du pays_, on a hopeless, sick bed, inland, in Germany, it would have relieved those yearnings but to look across an element so instinct with English associations, that it would seem rather to unite me to than sever me from my native island. And, truly, when I did at last stand on the brink of the dark blue sea, my home-sick wishes seemed already half fulfilled, and it was not till many months afterwards that I actually crossed the Channel. But I am, besides, personally under deep obligations to the great deep. Twice, indeed, in a calm, and in a storm, has my life been threatened with a salt-water catastrophe; but that quarrel has long been made up, and forgiven, in gratitude for the blessing and bracing influence of the breezes that smack of the ocean brine. Dislike the sea!--With what delight aforetime used I to swim in it, to dive in it, to sail on it! Ask honest Tom Woodgate, of Hastings, who made of me, for a landsman, a tolerable boatsman. Even now, when do I feel so easy in body, and so cheerful in spirit, as when walking hard by the surge, listening, as if expecting some whisperings of friendly but distant voices, in its eternal murmuring. Sick of the sea! If ever I have a water-drinking fancy, it is a wish that the ocean brine had been sweet, or sour instead of salt, so as to be potable; for what can be more tempting _to the eye_ as a draught, than the pure fluid, almost invisible with clearness, as it lies in some sandy scoop, or rocky hollow, a true “Diamond of the Desert,” to say nothing of the same living liquid in its effervescing state, when it sparkles up, hissing and bubbling in the ship’s wake--the very Champaigne of water! Above all what intellectual solar and soothing syrup have I not derived from the mere contemplation of the boundless main,--the most effectual and innocent of mental sedatives, and often called in aid of that practical philosophy it has been my wont to recommend in the present work. For whenever, owing to physical depression, or a discordant state of the