In these little sketches [1899] of a few out of the innumerable multitude of ways in which the sea has spoken to me during my long acquaintance with it, I have tried with ’prentice hand to reproduce for shore-dwellers some of the things it has told me. (Author’s Preface) His whales and sharks and other monsters of the deep are creatures with whom one is proud to be associated. These Idylls—little pictures—strike me as some of the most vivid things ever written about the sea. I take it that only a man who has used the sea as a common sailor, and before the mast, really knows it in all its humours,… It is not conventionally that I have called Mr. Bullen’s work “vivid.” It is of writing such as his that we can say, and say truly: “I watch no longer—I myself am there.”… In spite of the fact that he knows so much science, and makes so keen and convincing a use of this knowledge, there is always an air of mystery and enchantment about his writing…. that a sense of something strange an
