A man to match the mountains and the sea.

The line praises a figure whose stature—moral, imaginative, or spiritual—is commensurate with the grandeur of nature. “Mountains and the sea” function as traditional emblems of the sublime: permanence, vastness, and elemental power. To call someone “a man to match” them is to claim he is not diminished by immensity but equal to it in courage, endurance, and breadth of vision. In Markham’s idiom, such language often signals an ideal of democratic greatness: the truly “large” person is one who can meet the world’s hardest realities without shrinking, and whose inner resources are as expansive as the landscapes invoked.