Under the walls Where swells and falls The bay's deep breast at intervals, A cloud upon the liquid sky. The day so mild Is Heaven's own child, With Earth and Ocean reconciled; Around me steal Are murmuring to the murmuring keel. Over the rail My hand I trail Within the shadow of the sail; The cooling sense Glides down my drowsy indolence. With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Where summer sings and never dies; She glows and shines Her children, hid The cliffs amid, Are gambolling with the gambolling kid; Or down the walls With tipsy calls, Laugh in the rocks like waterfalls. The fisher's child, With tresses wild, Unto the smooth, bright sand beguiled, With glowing lips Sings as she skips, And gazes at the far-off ships. Yon deep bark goes Where traffic blows, From lands of sun to lands of snows; Its course is run From lands of snow to lands of sun. O happy ship, With the blue crystal at your lip! My heart with you Sails, and sails, and sings anew! No more, no more Upbraids me with its loud uproar! With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise. Thomas Buchanan Read T IN GUERNSEY I HE heavenly bay, ringed round with cliffs and moors, Storm-stain'd ravines, and crags that lawns in lay, Soothes as with love the rocks whose guard se cures The heavenly bay. O friend, shall time take ever this away, Though sight be changed for memory, love en sures What memory, changed by love to sight, would say The word that seals forever mine and yours II My mother sea, my fostress, what new strand, What new delight of waters, may this be, The fairest found since time's first breezes fanned My mother sea? Once more I give me body and soul to thee, Who hast my soul forever: cliff and sand Recede, and heart to heart once more are we. My heart springs first and plunges, ere my hand Strike out from shore: more close it brings to me, More near and dear than seems my fatherland, My mother sea. III Across and along, as the bay's breadth opens, and o'er us Wild autumn exults in the wind, swift rapture and strong Impels us, and broader the wide waves brighten before us Across and along. The whole world's heart is uplifted and knows not wrong; The whole world's life is a chant to the seatide's chorus; Are we not as waves of the water, as notes of the song? Like children unworn of the passions and toils that wore us, We breast for a season the breadth of the seas that throng, Rejoicing as they, to be borne as of old they bore us Across and along. Algernon Charles Swinburne B TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE UT by the sea-banks where at morn their foes One sick with grief of heart and sleepless, one And Tristram with the first pale windy light When the wind speaks not, and the pines are dumb, And summer takes her fill ere autumn comes Of life more soft than slumber: but ere day Rose, and the first beam smote the bounding bay, Up sprang the strength of the dark East, and took With its wide wings the waters as they shook, That leaps up light to wrestle with the sea As a young child's with rapture of the hour That brought his spirit and all the world to flower, And all the bright blood in his veins beat time To the wind's clarion and the water's chime That called him and he followed it and stood On the sand's verge before the grey great flood Where the white hurtling heads of waves that met Rose unsaluted of the sunrise yet. And from his heart's root outward shot the sweet Strong joy that thrilled him to the hands and feet, Filling his limbs with pleasure and glad might, |