“Land in your eye!” said the mate, who was looking through the telescope.—Two Years Before the Mast.

Something of humour goes to the fancy of a shipmaster homeward bound with a mind oppressed by the discovery of land that is literally “all in his eye.” The emotions excited by Samuel Weller’s lantern in the soul of the scientific gentleman would be trifling compared with the fine triumph of a man who is the first to discover land. Though it be but a rock—nay, a reef or shoal—is it not a surer hand than that of the greatest poet for the carrying of one’s name down to the remotest posterity? What as a memorial so excellent and enduring as a piece of mother-earth? Every new chart enlarges the bounds of the discoverer’s fame. Take such a man as Bugsby. In what old black-letter book the life of him lies pierced through and through by worms I know not. I might search Limehouse and Poplar and find no oldest inhabitant able to tell me a word about Bugsby, whether he was a great merchant or a haggard water-thief, whether he fetched his last breath in Execution Dock, or died very honestly in a four-poster. Yet so long as the silver Thames continues to flow, so long (I am afraid) will its translucent tide—particularly in the neighbourhood of the East India Docks and the aromatic Isle of Dogs—go on murmuring the elegant name of Bugsby. Bugsby’s Reach! Think of the enormous fame of Bugsby! Then should not a master-mariner, sailing home with an entry concerning a discovery of land in his log-book, feel extremely boastful and happy? Supposing it to be, as it almost always is in this age of an exhausted world, an island or a rock entirely “in his eye:” it will be the same to him; he will go to his grave as cocksure about it as if he had landed, hoisted the Union Jack, taken possession of it in the Queen’s name, and called it by his own. Several nations may send forth ships to examine the spot: all whose commanders shall return and say there is nothing to be seen. But the first discoverer of land is a being not to be easily cheated out of his convictions. “Land-ho?” “Whereaway?” “Dead abeam!” And there it must stand, a piece of holy ground in our skipper’s faith, latitude unquestionable, longitude exact, though a shift of wind or a new complexion of light would attenuate the solid object into a texture considerably thinner than the most difficult of the difficult airs of the mountaintops.

Some islands have been unaffected dreams. Such was that shore which at the dawning of the day proved to be “a land flat to our sight, and full of boscage, which made it show the more dark,” called by its discoverer New Atlantis. Such was that happy republic whose “figure is not unlike a crescent; between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay.” Such, too, are the queer countries of Swift and Rabelais, and of several philosophers and poets, both of ancient and modern times. But, on the other hand, many of the old sea-girt demon-haunted rocks, the sunny and spice-sweetened and flower-coloured dominions of the ocean fairies, the little surf-washed principalities of dead seamen’s souls, were as real as immoderate private conviction could render them. They had been seen! the ancient mariner, with a beard as long as his whom Henrie Lane writes of in “Hakluyt”—“At their rising, the prince called them to his table, to receive each one a cup from his hand to drinke, and tooke into his hand Master George Killingworth’s beard, which reached over the table, and pleasantly delivered it to the Metropolitane, who seeming to blesse it, sayd in Russe, this is God’s gift. As, indeede, at that time it was not onely thicke, broad, and yellow-coloured, but in length five foot and two inches of assize”—the ancient mariner, I say, staring under the sharp of his hand, with eyes on fire with alarm and amazement, his mighty beard blowing like smoke upon his breast; this ancient mariner, standing on his tall poop near to the great lanthorn, with pennons many ells in length streaming from the topmast heads, the bonaventure mast sloping well aft, the sprit-top-sail glancing under the yawn of the forecourse like a sheet of silk, beheld the magic islands with his own fiery eyes under his own shaggy white brows, and on his return did depose to them with awful solemnity, calling upon many saints to bear witness to his veracity, and expressing himself as being perfectly willing to be boiled, fried, burnt, or in any other way “dressed,” if his statement could be proved a lie.

His voyages furnished him with queer relations to deliver. The ocean was a huge mystery; and things which familiarity has long ago rendered mean were instinct with the terror, the splendour, the power, the majesty of the ocean, marvellous with the spirit of the measureless surface and the unfathomed depths, in the midst of which the early mariner found them. The enchanted island was real enough then. The sea-life was in its beginning: it was credulous as a man’s childhood is; and, childlike, it took wonders and astonishments and impossibilities for the truth, and by sheer stress of prodigious faith made them so.

It must have been a noble time to go to sea in. A boy starts now as a sailor for India or China, and his head is full of fancies of elephants, ivory, gleaming towers, wild beasts, coloured men, and strange coins. His imagination reaches no further than his reading, or what has been told him. He pretty well knows what he is to see, and of course, what he sees falls infinitely short of his expectations. But the ocean to the ancient mariner was pure Wonderland. Read what he has to say of the whale, the albatross, the iceberg. Coleridge catches the infantile awe and astonishment of the early voyagers in that exquisite “rime” of his, in which the commonplaces of the deep show mighty and fearful, as a sort of prodigies indeed, in the organ-utterance of the aged seaman of lean and Ember-week-like aspect. In these days if a man arrives home with a yarn of an uncharted rock his tale is to the last degree prosaic. The primitive navigator, on the other hand, would have found it a heap of extraordinary sights, a mass of miracles. Of course he had this advantage over us moderns: he could hint at its situation with such happy ambiguity as would defy discovery of it, even if the astrolabe and the cross-staff had been as precise as the sextant and the chronometer. But then he credited his own detections. His tales rendered his charts as queer to the eye as a star-map outlined with the zodiacal symbolism; and the ocean was like Spenser’s poem for witcheries, marvels, necromancies, monstrous shapes, dreadful sounds, and mysterious islands. A romantic marine age, indeed, when Cape Fly-away was to be doubled, and No Man’s Land made!

Of the unparalleled isles of the ancient mariner many descriptions are extant. We hear of floating islands, verdant with tropic vegetation, suddenly rising to the surface of the sea, then foundering; of islands, covered with medicinal herbs of greater efficacy even than the most largely advertised of modern pills, approaching the coast once in every seven years; of islands inhabited by women only; of islands merely enchanted, such as the old New England voyager’s: “very thick foggie weather, we sailed by an inchanted island, saw a great deal of filth and rubbish floating by the ship;” of islands formed of green meadows, which, says Mr. Wirt Sikes, “were supposed to be the abode of the souls of certain Druids who, not holy enough to enter the heaven of the Christians, were still not wicked enough to be condemned to the tortures of Annwn, and so were accorded a place in this romantic sort of purgatorial paradise.”—“British Goblins.” Here is one of Mandeville’s twisters:—

“In an isle clept Crues, ben schippes withouten nayles of iren, or bonds, for the rockes of the adamandes; for they ben alle fulle there aboute in that see, that it is marveyle to spaken of. And gif a schippe passed by the marches, and hadde either iren bands or iren nayles, anon he sholde ben perishet. For the adamande of this kinde draws the iren to him; and so wolde it draw to him the schippe, because of the iren; that he sholde never departen fro it, ne never go thens.”^[65]

How must the apprehension of encountering such islands as this, capable of wrecking a stout ship by magnetically extracting her iron bolts and so dissolving her, have set the knees of the sturdiest old sailors knocking one against another! Or figure the emotions with which they would view the prospect of going ashore upon such an island as we have here: “There came a southe winde, and drof the shyppe northward, whereas they saw an ylonde full dirke and full of stench and smoke; and then they herde grete blowinge and blasting of belowes, but they might see noothynge, but herde grete thunderyng.”^[66]

But these wonderful isles of the sea differed widely, some being very horrible and some being delightful. “Oh,” sings Thomas Moore—

Such an island as this was discovered and duly reported. First by a monk, who after sailing three days due east beheld a dark cloud, which when it cleared, revealed an island where “was joy and mirthe enough.” This monk had apparently been induced to put to sea by the assurance of a mariner that he had met Judas floating on a rock! It was reserved for St. Brandau, however, to christen this delectable spot, and he called it the Blessed Island. Though its existence was fully believed in, its reputation faded as the years rolled by and nobody came home to say he had seen it. Then, all on a sudden, a Lisbon pilot stumbled upon it in a gale of wind, and so excited the appetite of a Spanish nobleman for its felicities that his lordship fitted out an expedition for no other purpose than to find it. Happier for him had it remained a secret of the deep! he was wrecked upon it, fell into a trance that lasted some years, woke up mad, and returned to Spain with a long story of its being populated and ruled by a descendant of the last King of the Goths. The Spanish nobleman’s experiences of its blessedness did not weaken the general faith in this ocean paradise; search was made for it so late as 1721, after which it disappears. Possibly it was the account of some such an island as this that addled the brains of King Gavran and sent him seeking for the enchanted fairy meadows which floated upon the sea. He took his family with him, and he and they were never heard of more. But does not one see in all this how real those islands were, how seductive or repellant, and how delightfully different from the plain discoveries of the modern mariner, whether fancied or real?

“There are traditions,” says Mr. Wirt Sikes, “of sailors who in the early part of the present century actually went ashore on the fairy islands, not knowing that they were such until they returned to their boats, when they were filled with awe at seeing the islands disappear from their sight, neither sinking in the sea nor floating away upon the waters, but simply vanishing suddenly.”

There is pleasantness and softness in the fancy of men in olden days putting forth to sea in search of islands of bliss, of insulated paradises as visionary as the poet’s dream-like shore dimly resounding the wash of fairy breakers.^[67] The mariner must have spun his yarn to some purpose to awaken that thirsty desire of emigration. Many wonders, which might have remained hidden for ever in the dark ocean solitude, were lighted on by elderly gentlemen with long hair and in costumes like bed-gowns, who were abroad searching for spots which the Jacks of that age had declared to be out and away superior to Eden. Maildun, a Celtic hero, one of these searchers, came across several islands filled with demons and monsters. He also encountered a Circe, and eventually the terrestrial paradise. But nothing particular seems to have come of these discoveries, and it is to be suspected that he did not take the trouble to verify their position. Another person, a saint, after a long search, found a holy island inhabited by twenty-four monks. How these monks managed to get there, in what condition the saint found them, whether they were spontaneous growths or a kind of melancholic survival of a state of society whose origin is hopelessly indeterminable, we are not told. The same saint also met with an island whose inhabitants were fallen angels, and an island populated by fiends, who fell upon him and forced him to fly. In fact, if this saint is to be believed, he was quite the Captain Cook of his day. Yet his search after the Australia Incognita of bliss must, I think, be pronounced distinctly unsatisfactory, though one cannot but respect a theory of life that could impart the animation of adventure to a monastic bosom.

But much of what old ocean has of romance in its history lies in the ancient reports of its wonders, and in the interpretation of its legible characters by the child-like vision of the vanished shipmen. Remove those Fortunate Islands, those Blessed Islands, those islands haunted by “demon women wailing for their lovers:” strike out from the annals those fables, faint with a strange light, of venturesome marine saints, of marvelling, bright-eyed, hook-nosed “marineeres;” and I am afraid that what else of human poetry remains must be sought in the ship’s forecastle. The very fish they saw, sporting in the yeast over the side, were as astonishing as the islands they passed. “Along all that coast,” wrote Mr. Thomas Stevens, “we often times saw thing swimming upon the water like a cock’s combe (which they call a ship at Guinea), but the colour much fairer; which combe standeth upon a thing almost like the swimmer of a fish in colour and bignesse, and beareth underneath in the water, strings, which save it from turning over.”^[68] “Od’s fish!” would seem an appropriate expression in the mouths of such navigators. What sort of thing is this cockscomb with strings? They wrapt up what they saw in quaint dark words; and their imagination operating on what they beheld set life a-teeming with marvels. Or mark them sailing past a headland: “At this Cape lieth a great stone, to the which the barkes that passed thereby, were wont to make offerings of butter, meale and other victuals, thinking that unlesse they did so, their barkes or vessels should there perish, as it hath been oftentimes seene; and there it is very darke and mistie.”^[69] Thus these poor old fellows, crossing themselves and singing a litany the while, propitiate the demon of the place with offerings of wet and dry stores, and you see them in fancy grouped in a body upon the deck, watching with bowed heads and level, alarmed gaze the sullen and dismal loom of the coast slowly veering away upon the quarter, as though the rugged, fog-swollen mass might at any moment shape itself into the titanic proportions of the fiend-king of the cold and barren land.

To those early eyes such monsters revealed themselves, that the like was never heard of before or since. A crew would come home and say that they had met with an extraordinary animal that had a horse’s body and a pig’s head; another, that they had seen a similar wonder, only in this case it was a stag’s body with horns; a third, that one day, the sea being calm, there rose close to the ship an animal that had the head and snout of a boar, and that spurted water through a tube at the top of its head. Those were the halcyon days of the mermaid and the merman; leviathan then sported in twenty different terrible shapes, with mouth most hideously garnished with quadruple rows of teeth, gaping moonwards; the sea-serpent wrapped the spinning globe about with a million leagues of scales; strange voices whispered in mysterious accents under the still intertropic starlight, and shapes like the shadows of pinions moved upon the midnight air; spectral lanthorns were hung up by spirit-hands at the yard-arms and on the bowsprit-end, and, by their dull, graveyard illumination, cast a dismal complexion of death upon the upwards-staring faces of the mariners. I find those early seamen always sailing along as if possessed with an uncontrollable awe and reverence; they are punctual in their prayers; the whole story of their navigation is but a single-hearted reference to the majesty and mercy of the Most High; the atmosphere about them trembles to their devout muttering of Aves and the low chanting of psalms. The ocean was a mystery, the home and the haunt of creatures and objects not to be conceived by the understanding of men. The spirit and influence of the liquid solitude beyond the familiar line, over whose edge the sun rose or sank every day, you will find expressed with artless, most impressive power in the narrative of the first voyage of Columbus in Harris’s Collection, briefly recited as the great admiral’s adventures there are. For such and for earlier mariners—as indeed for later, down even to the times of Dampier, Shelvocke, Cowley, and the Dutch and French explorers of the early years of the last century—the sea could not but hold islands of enchantment, green places deep in its heart, on whose sands the water-nymphs fresh from their coral pavilions, sat combing their yellow hair; paradisaical abodes whose soil was brilliant with gold dust, over whose trees, radiant with fruit, flew birds of a plumage of dazzling splendour, in whose central valley girls of startling beauty might be seen in the moonlight threading with languid eyes the mazes of some amorous dance. Did not even Herman Melville, so recently as 1830 or 1840, find some such enchanted island as this in the Marquesas group?

The sudden emergence or subsidence of land would also help to confirm the ancient mariner in his belief in magic isles, and in their controlment by spells of necromancy. In an old nautical magazine, dated 1802, I find the following: “On the seventh of June, 1790, the Seahorse, Captain Mayo, of Boston, from the coast of Africa, saw (in lat. 73 south) a large point of land sink in one moment into the unfathomable deep! As soon as the crew recovered from the inexpressible horror which so tremendous a spectacle must have impressed on their minds, they steered to some ships catching whales, and found that their men had been spectators of the same awful scene. The seamen involuntarily dropped down upon their knees and thanked God for their escape, having been on the same point of land a short time before its sudden disappearance.”

They saw the land disappear; but suppose no other vessels had been in company, and it had chanced that none of the crew had seen the land sink, you have then the seeds of an amazing relation. Figure a dead calm, all hands below at dinner, and nobody on deck but the man at the wheel nodding drowsily over the spokes. The land was plain enough in sight, a mile distant, perhaps, when the crew left the deck; when they return it has vanished. Had it been a ship they would, of course, suppose that she had foundered. But land! is it possible that a tall, substantial mass of land shall vanish on a sudden like a wreath of tobacco smoke? Had the vessel been whirled away out of sight of it by a fierce current? Had she been insensibly blown some leagues along by a stout breeze of wind? No. The man at the wheel is questioned; he rubs his eyes, stares; it is the same marvel to him as to the others. Knowing something of the sailor’s character, I will venture to say that had not those men of the Seahorse actually seen the land go down, two-thirds of them would have gone to their graves persuaded that there had been witchcraft in the business. But put the date back three centuries, into the period of the real Ancient Mariner. He shall behold the cliff founder, if you please, and yet land at Plymouth or Erith with an imagination charged to bursting point with this obvious Satanic engorgement. I think I see him telling the story. Can his hearers, gazing upon his mahogany face, doubt that there are islands which rise and sink? and how can they rise or sink without magical possession, without being under the government of something to direct them? The ancient mariner may, indeed, be beforehand with a solution by importing, let me say, one jaw of a monstrous fish that did “suck ye londe down to ye admiration of ye beholders.” But failing some such explanation, the reason must be sought for devil-wards. The island or cliff easily becomes the abode of demons or of ocean-spirits, who use their dominions as a sort of ship, and who, when they desire a change of air or scene, alter their latitude and longitude by the easy expedient of a submarine excursion. Such a solution could not long miss of confirmation. For presently arrives some Elizabeth-Jonah, or some Ascension, of London, or Jesus, of Hull, with an extraordinary and incredible report: to wit, that being about fifty leagues to the westwards of the island of Madeira, there did happen a mighty commotion in the sea; the water boiled furiously, and out of the midst of it there arose a great flame that was followed by a thick black coil of smoke which emitted a most detestable stench. This, rising, did overspread the heavens with a sable canopy, through which the sun, that had before been ardent, glowed ruefully with a most affrighting face. When the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and the sea fallen flat again, they observed a great heap of black land floating just where the flame had been; but now, to their great joy, a small gale happening, they hastily trimmed their sails to it and departed, with hearty thanksgiving for their merciful deliverance from a hideous and diabolic spot. There would be to the full as much truth in this as in the account of the subsidence. In every century there have been submarine volcanic disturbances which have dislodged or uphove points of land, rocks, little and even big islands. Suppose what these cheery old mariners beheld was, instead of land, a body of compacted weed; or, not impossibly, a dead whale. No matter! home with the thrilling story; and let any man be pilloried who shall dare to doubt that the rock that came up is not the very identical rock that went down!

I find a singular example of the credulity that gives to the sea the choicest flavour of romance in a note to the life of Sir William Gascoigne, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in the reign of King Henry IV., in the first edition (1750) of the “Biographia Britannica”:—

“When the said Sir Bernard Gascoigne” (the writer is referring to a descendant of Sir William) “returned from his embassy into England, he took shipping at Dunkirk, and one of the passengers who came over with him was Mrs. Aphra Behn, the ingenious poetess. It is asserted by the writer of her life that in the course of their voyage they all saw a surprising PhÆnomenon, whether formed by any rising exhalations or descending vapours shaped by the winds and irradiated by refracted lights, is not explained; but it appeared through Sir Bernard’s telescopes, in a clear day at a great distance, to be or to resemble a fine, gay, floating fabrick, adorned with figures, festoons, etc. At first they suspected some art in his glasses, till at last, as it approached, they could see it plainly without them; and the relater is so particular in the description as to assert that it appeared to be a four-squared floor of various coloured marble, having rows of fluted and twisted pillars ascending, with cupids on the top circled with vines and flowers, and streamers waving in the air. ’Tis added of this strange visionary, if not romantic or poetical, pageant—for fancy is an architect that can build castles in the clouds as well by sea as land—that it floated almost near enough for them to step out upon it; as if it would invite them to a safer landing than they sought by sailing; or pretended that the one should be as dangerous and deceitful as the other; for soon after the calm which ensued there arose such a violent storm that they were all shipwreckt, but happily in sight of land, to which by timely assistance they all got safe.”

Here, to be sure, we have a very circumstantial account of a very astonishing apparition. This would seem to have been the Blessed Island for which the saints and a noble Spanish lord made search in earlier times. It is a pity that the story comes to us in the life of so lively a romancer as Mrs. Aphra Behn; one would rather have had the grave and wary Sir Bernard’s version. Certain points suggest the legend of Vanderdecken, as for example the circumstance of the storm rising and shipwreck following the approach of the island-pavilion. This fabric of fluted pillars and radiant banners must count among the mysterious disappearances. Why, when these phenomenal glories of the deep floated into full view of the mariner—why had not he the heart to straightway launch his shallop, row with anchor and cable to the magic strand, and “fix” the place, as the Yankees would say, for the satisfaction and diversion of posterity? Why should all those wonders have been in vain? If the modern seaman lack the poetic vision of the early navigator, he is more generous in his detections; he desires the world to share in his own satisfaction, and goes very painfully and exactly to his relation, though it does but concern an iceberg or a body of vapour. The gallant Rodney, when Commodore (1752), was sent cruising in search of an island which one Captain W. Otton, of the snow^[70] St. Paul, of London, discovered in his passage from South Carolina, about three hundred leagues west of Scilly. The record in Otton’s journal was extremely minute. He gave the date and hour—March 4, 1748–9, two in the afternoon—on which he made the land. He related how it bore, how he tacked, how the wind was, and what the latitude and longitude:—

“This island stretches N.W. and S.E., about five leagues long and about nine miles wide. On the south side five valleys and a great number of birds. This day a ship’s masts came alongside. On the south point of said island is a small marshy island.”

As though all this should not be deemed confirmatory enough of his discovery, the Captain added that he thought he saw a tent on the island, and would have gone ashore, “but had unfortunately stove his boat.” Rodney, in company with Captain Mackenzie, a distinguished mathematician, cruised for many days, but to no purpose. The island was entirely in the eye of the captain of the snow St. Paul. An old saint or ancient Spanish nobleman would not have let us off so easily. The comparatively modern skipper tells of an ordinary island, prosaically but generously invites all mariners to participation in his discovery, but humanely leaves land-going imagination and curiosity unvexed. The saint or the nobleman would probably have heard the sound of viols, perhaps an organ; the hymning of a collection of monks would have been a distinguishable music; the more erotic vision of the nobleman might have witnessed lovely forms and the seductive beckoning of foam-white hands. We should have had gilded dolphins gambolling among the breakers, and been tickled by a hundred tales more startling than Marryat’s Pasha was regaled with.

Of what material are these fantastic fabrics, real to the beholders, manufactured? Imagination is the loom, but whence comes the stuff? Yet there are many spectacles at sea which the meditative, artless fancy may easily work into creations of beauty, or fear, or brilliance, melancholy, and horror. You must go back—put yourself in the place of the mariner newly arrived in an ocean-waste whose surface his keel is the first to furrow. Then think how the iceberg in the heart of the black gale will strike you: the pallid mountain-mass flashing out to the wild violet lightning dart, the vision or phantasm of a city of pinnacles, spires, minarets, with the crystal smoke of the storm whirling in clouds about its towering heights, whose ravines and scars thunder back in echoes the cannonading of the rushing surges hurling their madness upon the side of that mass of rocky faintness. Or consider the magnificence and splendour of the Northern sunset—different, indeed, from the bald glory of the sinking of the rayless tropic orb—viewed by one who, having for days stemmed towards the Pole, penetrates for the first time the wide white silence of the Greenland parallels. From those dyes of the luminary, or the more amazing coruscations of the aurora borealis, what shadows of realities might not the wondering eye of the mariner evoke, observing rainbow islands to repose on seas of gold, lands of delicate effulgence and of tints too exquisitely beautiful to serve for less than the home of a race of beings whose idea and raiment must be sought in those classic poems in which the gods of the Greeks and the Romans are described! From the texture of the shoulders of rising clouds, from shifting veins of moonlight in the lace-like drapery of white mist, from the luminous shadow of the waterspout with its wing-shaped peak and boiling base, the new imagination, far out upon the bosom of nameless waters, would readily snatch material enough for half those wonders of magic spaces of shore which in those times dotted the oceans of the world from the latitude of Schouten’s iron headland to the height of Nova Zembla. Or, to descend to homelier stuff, omitting the mirage—perhaps the fancy’s noblest opportunity on the deep—there is the ship bottom up; the inverted hulk that for months may have been washing about until she has gathered to her sodden timbers a large estate of sea-weed and marine fungi. The Telmaque rock had undoubtedly no better foundation than this. The passengers—it was in 1786—saw green grass and moss on the rock. This settled the matter; the new island was duly logged and then charted; yet what could it prove but a capsized hull? So of the famous Ariel Rocks, which, in my humble opinion, must be put down to a dead whale or two.

“Captain T. Dickson, of the Ariel, when on a voyage from Liverpool to Valparaiso, December, 1827, saw something of a reddish appearance about a quarter of a mile from the vessel; sounded in forty-seven fathoms, fine grey sand. Approaching the object it seemed about six feet above water, when another appeared about three feet below the surface; the sea broke on both; much sea-weed and many birds around; the position was determined by good mer. alt. of sun, and by lunar and chronometric observations.”^[71]

H.M.S. Beagle, with the late Dr. Darwin on board, passed several times over the position assigned to these rocks, but found nothing—yes, her people found this: “A heavy swell arose on the quarter which struck our weather-quarter boat, and turned her in upon the deck.... I thought we had indeed found the rocks, and the huge black back of a dead whale which just then showed itself very near the vessel, much increased the sensation.”

In more ways than one may the mysterious disappearance of islands be accounted for. The sternly prosaic mariner will desire nothing in this direction that is not real, and of this as little as possible. But happily for the poetic student these disappearances stop short at the precincts of ocean literature. Enter, and the magic is all before you, perennial in its gorgeousness or terror, its sweetness or extravagance of horror. Who would wish one of those enchanted islands away? No prow built by human hands need fear them as a danger; they lie in a daylight or a midnight of their own, washed by the elfin surf of faery-land, lashed by the storms of high imagination, phantoms under phantom suns and stars, dreams of the young-eyed mariner. They are uncharted; but love has their bearings, and memory holds them fondly to their moorings. Of the sea they form the daintiest romance, and they give a colouring of poetry even to the dry and austere perpetuation of such things in these days of scientific exactness and the occasional blunders of the triumphant discoverer.