“Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech,
nor cozen from your path
The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach,
and Hadria’s white-lipped wrath;
Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood
my fraud-avenging hosts;
Nor make at all or all make good your
bulwarks and your boasts.
“Now and henceforward serve unshod
through wet and wakeful shifts,
A present and oppressive God, but take,
to aid, my gifts—
The wide and windward-opened eye, the
large and lavish hand,
The soul that cannot tell a lie—except
upon the land!”
In dromond and in catafract—wet,
wakeful, windward-eyed—
He kept Poseidon’s Law intact (his
ship and freight beside),
But, once discharged the dromond’s
hold, the bireme beached once more,
Splendaciously mendacious rolled the brass-bound
man ashore.
* * * *
*
The thranite now and thalamite are pressures
low and high,
And where three hundred blades bit white
the twin-propellers ply:
The God that hailed, the keel that sailed,
are changed beyond recall,
But the robust and brass-bound man he
is not changed at all!
From Punt returned, from Phormio’s
Fleet, from Javan and Gadire,
He strongly occupies the seat about the
tavern fire,
And, moist with much Falernian or smoked
Massilian juice,
Revenges there the brass-bound man his
long-enforced truce!
As literature, it is beneath contempt. It concerns
the endurance, armament, turning-circle, and inner
gear of every ship in the British Navy—the
whole embellished with profile plates. The Teuton
approaches the matter with pagan thoroughness; the
Muscovite runs him close; but the Gaul, ever an artist,
breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present
day, of the British sailorman.
In this, I conceive, he is from time to time aided
by the zealous amateur, though I find very little
in his dispositions to show that he relies on that
amateur’s hard-won information. There exists—unlike
some other publication, it is not bound in lead boards—a
work by one “M. de C.,” based on the absolutely
unadorned performances of one of our well-known Acolyte
type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did
not happen. It covers a period of two days; runs
to twenty-seven pages of large type exclusive of appendices;
and carries as many exclamation points as the average
Dumas novel.
I read it with care, from the adorably finished prologue—it
is the disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce
a commissioned officer capable of writing one page
of lyric prose—to the eloquent, the joyful,
the impassioned end; and my first notion was that
I had been cheated. In this sort of book-collecting
you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at
the mercy of his agent.
