The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth of an imagined sailor,
but they are none the less diverting. The stanza containing the distich
ends with a striking piece of realism:
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.
This is the course of action usually pursued by sailors during a gale.
The first or second mate goes around and tucks them up comfortably, each
in his hammock, and serves them out an extra ration of grog after the
storm is over.
Barry Cornwall must have had an exceptionally winning personality,
for he drew to him the friendship of men as differently constituted as
Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. He was liked by the best of
his time, from Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, who caught a
glimpse of the aged poet in his vanishing. The personal magnetism of an
author does not extend far beyond the orbit of his contemporaries. It is
of the lyrist and not of the man I am speaking here. One could wish he
had written more prose like his admirable "Recollections of Elia.
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