Sacred to me those fibres fine mine They build no houses, plant no mills These nourish not like homelier glows An hour they pitch their shifting tents In thoughts, in feelings, and events; Beneath the palm-trees, on the grass, They sing, they dance, make love, and chatter, Vex the grim temples with their clatter, And make Truth's fount their looking glass. Than where Italian earth receives eaves, A picnic life ; from love to love, ered, No lens to see them through like her, THE NOMADES. So witchingly her finger-tips row A perfectness found nowhere else. What Nature makes in any mood hover The beach-bird on its pearly verge Follows and flies the whispering surge, While, in his tent, the rock-stayed shell Awaits the flood's star-timed vibrations, And both, the flutter and the patience, The sauntering poet loves them well. Fulfil so much of God's decree sons, The Will that in the planets reasons With Space-wide logic, has its throne. Thy virtue makes not vice of mine, SELF-STUDY. A PRESENCE both by night and day, poor. Gasping under titanic ferns; 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 wigs , 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, And under all a deep, dull roar, Dying and swelling, forevermore, Rock and moan and roar alone, And the dread of some nameless thing unknown, 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, Jumbled together in a pile, And (though you know they never once stir), 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 spout With pauses between, as if they were listening, Then tumult anon when the surf breaks glistening In the blackness where they wallow about. Since you have found me out, I go; Another lover I must find, Content his happiness to know, Nor strive its secret to unwind." PICTURES FROM APPLEDORE. I. A HEAP of bare and splintery crags Tumbled about by lightning and frost, With rifts and chasms and storm bleached jags, That wait and growl for a ship to be lost; No island, but rather the skeleton Of a wrecked and vengeance-smitten one, Where, æons ago, with half-shut eye, The sluggish saurian crawled to die, II. All this you would scarcely comprehend, Should you see the isle on a sunny day: Then it is simpie enough in its way, — Two rocky bulges, one at each end, With a smaller bulge and a hollow be tween; Patches of whortleberry and bay ; Accidents of open green, 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 warınth, and never grew Tall enough for a peep at the sea; A general dazzle of open blue ; A breeze always blowing and playing rat-tat With the bow of the ribbon round your hat; A score of sheep that do nothing but stare Up or down at you everywhere; Three or four cattle that chew the cud Lying about in a listless despair ; A medrick that makes you look over head With short, sharp scream, as he sights And, dropping straight and swift as lead, Splits the water with sudden thud ; This is Appledore by day. A common island, you will say; But stay a moment : only climb Up to the highest rock of the isle, Stand there alone for a little while, And with gentle approaches it grows sublime, Dilating slowly as you win A sense from the silence to take in. So wide the loneness, so lucid the air, The granite beneath you so savagely bare, You well might think you were looking down From some sky-silenced mountain's crown, Whose far-down pines are wont to tear and bay, street, From the singular mess we agree to call Life, 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. his prey, Till now you dreamed not what could be done With a bit of rock and a ray of sun ; But look, how fade the lights and shades Of keen bare edge and crevice deep! How doubtfully it fades and fades, And glows again, yon craggy steep, O'er which, through color's dreamiest grades, 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, But flits from opal hue to hue, And runs through every tenderest range Of change that seems not to be change, So rare the sweep, so nice the art, That lays no stress on any part, But shifts and lingers and persuades; So soft that sun-brush in the west, That asks no costlier pigments' aids, But mingling knobs, flaws, angles, dints, Indifferent of worst or best, Enchants the cliffs with wraiths and hints And gracious preludings of tints, Where all seems fixed, yet all evades, And indefinably pervades Perpetual movement with perpetual rest! III. Away northeast is Boone Island light; these names, rapt in his blanket of blue haze, 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 ulous, Plashing with orange the palpitant lines Of mutable billow, crest after crest, And murmurs Agamenticus ! As if it were the name of a saint. But is that a mountain playing cloud, Or a cloud playing mountain, just there, so faint? Look along over the low right shoulder Of Agamenticus into that crowd Of brassy thunderheads behind it; Now you have caught it, but, ere you are older 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 It is there again, till your weary eyes Fancy they see it waver and rise, With its brother clouds; it is Agio chook, 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 see the beach there, where it is Flat as a threshing-floor, beaten and packed With the flashing fails of weariless seas, How it lifts and looms to a precipice, O'er whose square front, a dream, no more, The steepened sand-stripes seem to pour, A murmurless vision of cataract; You almost fancy you hear a roar, Fitful and faint from the distance wan dering; But 't is only the blind old ocean maun dering, Raking the shingle to and fro, Aimlessly clutching and letting go The kelp-haired sedges of Appledore, Slipping down with a sleepy forgetting, And anon his ponderous shoulder set ting, With a deep, hoarse pant against Ap pledore. Whose nearing outlines sharpen slowy near, Chilling your fancy to the core ? 'Tis only the sad old sea you hear, That seems to seek forevermore Something it cannot find, and so, Sighing, seeks on, and tells its woe To the pitiless breakers of Appledore. V. IV. Eastward as far as the eye can see, yard, And the clumsy junk and proa lie Sunk deep with precious woods and nard, 'Mid the palmy isles of the Orient. Those leaning towers of clouded white On the farthest brink of doubtful ocean, That shorten and shorten out of sight, Yet seem on the selfsame spot to stay, Receding with a motionless motion, Fading to dubious films of gray, Lost, dimly found, then vanished wholly, Will rise again, the great world under, First films, then towers, then high heaped clouds, How looks Appledore in a storm? crags seemed frantic, Butting against the mad Atlantic, When surge on surge would heap enorme, Cliffs of emerald topped with snow, That listed and lifted, and then let go A great white avalanche of thunder, , grinding, blinding, deafening ire Monadnock might have trembled under; And island, whose rock-roots pierce below To where they are warmed with the central fire, You could feel its granite fibres racked, As it seemed to plunge with a shud der and thrill Right at the breast of the swooping hill, And to rise again snorting a cataract Of rage-froth from every cranny and ledge, While the sea drew its breath in hoarse and deep, And the next vast breaker curled its edge, Gathering itself for a mightier leap. North, east, and south there are reefs and breakers You would never dream of in smooth weather, That toss and gore the sea for acres, Bellowing and gnashing and snarling together ; Look northward, where Duck Island lies, |