Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons), if I endeavour to account for the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given—­referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them—­scarcely goes deep enough into the question.  Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified.  The things do not fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind.  But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression:  enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity.  But the sea remains a disappointment.—­Is it not, that in the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH!  I do not say we, tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less.  I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description.  He comes to it for the first time—­all that he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life,—­all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and poetry; crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation.—­He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner

  For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
  Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;

of fatal rocks, and the “still-vexed Bermoothes;” of great whirlpools, and the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths:  of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth—­

  Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal,
  Compared with the creatures in the sea’s entral;

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids’ grots—­