The poems of Owen Meredith (Honble Robert Lytton.) ::

Can it be women that walk in the sea-mist, under the cliffs there
Which the unsatisfied surge sucks with importunate lip?
There, where out from the sand-chok'd anchors, on to the skiffs there,
Twinkle the slippery ropes, swinging adip and adrip?
All the place in a lurid, glimmering, emerald glory,
Glares like a Titan world come back under heaven again:
Yonder, aloof are the steeps of the sea-kings, famous in story;
But who are they on the beach? they are neither women nor men.
Who knows, are they the land's, or the water's, living creatures?
Born of the boiling sea? nurst in the seething storms?
With their woman's hair dishevell'd over their stern male features,
Striding, bare to the knee; magnified maritime forms!
They may be the mothers and wives, they may be the sisters and daughters
Of men on the dark mid-seas, alone in those black coil'd hulls,
That toil 'neath yon white cloud, whence the moon will rise o'er the waters
To-night, with her face on fire, if the wind in the evening lulls.
But they may be merely visions, such as only sick men witness,
(Sitting as I sit here, fill'd with a wild regret,)
Framed from the sea's misshapen spume with a horrible fitness
To the winds in which they walk, and the surges by which they are wet:—

Salamanders, seawolves, witches warlocks; marine monsters
Which the dying seaman beholds, when the rats are swimming away,
And an Indian wind 'gins hiss from an unknown isle, and alone stirs
The broken cloud which burns on the verge of the dead, red day.
I know not. All in my mind is confused; nor can I dissever
The mould of the visible world from the shape of my thoughts in me.
The Inward and Outward are fused: and, through them, murmur for ever
The sorrow whose sound is the wind, and the roar of the limitless sea.

University of Virginia Library

THE SHORE.