Who fell into the Ocean:

His mother came and took him out

With tokens of emotion.

She also had a daughter

Who fell into the water:

At any rate she would have fallen

If someone hadn't caught her.

The second son went frantic

And fell in the Atlantic:

His parent reached the spot too late

To check her offspring's antic.

Her grief was then terrific:

She fell in the Pacific,

Exclaiming with her latest breath

'I have been too prolific.'

The sea is a subject by no means exhausted. I have somewhere a poem which directs attention to one of its most striking characteristics, which hardly any of the poets seem to have observed. They call it salt and blue and deep and dark and so on; but they never make such profoundly true reflexions as the following:

0 billows bounding far,
How wet, how wet ye are!

When first my gaze ye met
I said 'Those waves are wet'.

I said it, and am quite
Convinced that I was right.

Who saith that ye are dry?
I give that man the lie.

Thy wetness, O thou sea,
Is wonderful to me.

It agitates my heart,
To think how wet thou art.

No object I have met
Is more profoundly wet,

Methinks, 'twere vain to try,
0 sea, to wipe thee dry,

I therefore will refrain -
Farewell, thou humid main.