It reappears in the Romantic revival with Coleridge, whose "Ancient Mariner" owes much to reminiscences of his favourite reading--_Purchas, his Pilgrimes_, and other old books of voyages.

The matter of this too-little noticed strain in English literature would suffice to fill a whole book; only a few of the main lines of its influence can be noted here.
For the English Renaissance--for Elizabeth's England, action and imagination went hand in hand; the dramatists and poets held up the mirror to the voyagers.

In a sense, the cult of the sea is the oldest note in English literature.

There is not a poem in Anglo-Saxon but breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air.

To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves.