Sacred to me those fibres fine That first clasped earth. O, ne'er be mine The alien sun and alien rain! These nourish not like homelier glows Than where Italian earth receives And, in dark firmaments of leaves, THE NOMADES. WHAT Nature makes in any mood I, who take root and firmly cling, At noon the slumberous poppies over,) Till once, upon a rock's brown bosom, Then first of both I felt the beauty; Clearer it grew than winter sky Gasping under titanic ferns; Granite shoulders and boulders and snags, Round which, though the winds in heaven be shut, The nightmared ocean murmurs and yearns, Welters, and swashes, and tosses, and turns, And the dreary black sea-weed lolls and wags; Only rock from shore to shore, Only a moan through the bleak clefts blown, With sobs in the rifts where the coarse kelp shifts, Falling and lifting, tossing and drifting, These make Appledore. These make Appledore by night: Then there are monsters left and right; Every rock is a different monster; All you have read of, fancied, dreamed, When you waked at night because you screamed, There they lie for half a mile, If you look long, they seem to be moving Just as plainly as plain can be, Crushing and crowding, wading and shoving Out into the awful sea, Where you can hear them snort and Two rocky bulges, one at each end, With a smaller bulge and a hollow be tween; Patches of whortleberry and bay; Sprinkled with loose slabs square and gray, Like graveyards for ages deserted; a few Unsocial thistles; an elder or two, Foamed over with blossoms white as spray; And on the whole island never a tree Save a score of sumachs, high as your knee, That crouch in hollows where they may, (The cellars where once stood a village, men say,) Huddling for warmth, and never grew A breeze always blowing and playing Whose far-down pines are wont to tear For Grandeur is inaccessibly proud, Who hunt down sunsets, and huddle and bay, Mouthing and mumbling the dying day. Trust me, 't is something to be cast From the singular mess we agree to call Where that is best which the most fools vote is, And to be set down on one's own two feet So nigh to the great warm heart of God, You almost seem to feel it beat Down from the sunshine and up from the sod; To be compelled, as it were, to notice All the beautiful changes and chances Through which the landscape flits and glances, And to see how the face of common day Is written all over with tender histories, When you study it that intenser way In which a lover looks at his mistress. Till now you dreamed not what could be done With a bit of rock and a ray of sun; The yellow sunbeams pause and creep! Now pink it blooms, now glimmers gray, Now shadows to a filmy blue, Tries one, tries all, and will not stay, And runs through every tenderest range Indifferent of worst or best, Enchants the cliffs with wraiths and hints And gracious preludings of tints, III. Away northeast is Boone Island light; Wherewith the lonely farmer tames He glowers there to the north of us, Unconvertibly savage, and scorns to take The white man's baptism or his ways. Him first on shore the coaster divines Through the early gray, and sees him shake The morning mist from his scalp-lock of pines; Him first the skipper makes out in the west, Ere the earliest sunstreak shoots trem- As if it were the name of a saint. Look along over the low right shoulder By half an hour, you will lose it and find it A score of times; while you look 't is gone, And, just as you 've given it up, anon There if you seek not, and gone if you look, Ninety miles off as the eagle flies. But mountains make not all the shore The main-land shows to Appledore ; Eight miles the heaving water spreads To a long low coast with beaches and heads That run through unimagined mazes, As the lights and shades and magical hazes Put them away or bring them near, Shimmering, sketched out for thirty miles Between two capes that waver like threads, And sink in the ocean, and reappear, Crumbled and melted to little isles, With filmy trees, that seem the mere Half-fancies of drowsy atmosphere; |