The Harbours of England | Page 5

lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the earth.
Then also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that
it does battle with. To lift dead weight; to overcome length of languid
space; to multiply or systematize a given force; this we may see done
by the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that
living fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against
the unwearied enmity of ocean,--the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting
of the black waves, provoking each other on, endlessly, all the infinite
march of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help,--and still to
strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its
way against them, and keep its charge of life from them;--does any
other soulless thing do as much as this?
I should not have talked of this feeling of mine about a boat, if I had
thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who
are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and
close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat
remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity
in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective
nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is
swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its
steadiness of poise--its assured standing on the clear softness of the
abyss; and, after that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as
shall be consistent with this defiance of the treachery of the sea. And,
this being understood, it is very notable how commonly the poets,
creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a

boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do, it
is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or soar,"
involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to let the
wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to themselves;
but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a Spiritual
Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and seas of
quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in general
because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a triumph to find
the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of visiting the
stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";[I] and to find
Tennyson--although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a very marshy
and punt-like character--at last, in his highest inspiration, enter in
where the wind began "to sweep a music out of sheet and shroud."[J]
But the chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had known all manner of
traveling; had been borne through vacancy on the shoulders of
chimeras, and lifted through upper heaven in the grasp of its spirits; but
yet I do not remember that he ever expresses any positive wish on such
matters, except for a boat.
[I] Prologue to Peter Bell.
[J] In Memoriam, ci.
"Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I, Led by some strong enchantment,
might ascend A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly With
winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend, So that no change nor
any evil chance Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be That
even satiety should still enhance Between our souls their strict
community: And that the bounteous wizard then would place Vanna
and Bice, and our Lapo's love, Companions of our wandering, and
would grace With passionate talk, wherever we might rove, Our time,
and each were as content and free As I believe that thou and I should
be."
And of all the descriptions of motion in the Divina Commedia, I do not
think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has glorified
the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright sea which
surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed souls to

their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there is no stroke
of laboring oar, for his wings are the sails.
"My preceptor silent yet Stood, while the brightness that we first
discerned Opened the form of wings: then, when he knew The pilot,
cried aloud, 'Down, down; bend low Thy knees; behold God's angel:
fold thy hands: Now shalt thou see true ministers indeed. Lo! how all
human means he sets at nought; So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail
Except his wings, between such distant shores. Lo! how straight up