High Tide at Midnight.

NO breath is on the glimmering ocean-floor,

No blast beneath the windless Pleiades, But thro' dead night a melancholy roar,

A voice of moving and of marching seas,— The boom of thundering waters on the shore, Sworn with slow force by desolate degrees Once to go on, and whelm for evermore

Earth and her folk and all their phantasies.
Then half asleep in the great sound I seem
Lost in the starlight, dying in a dream

Where overmastering powers abolish me,-
Drown, and thro' dim euthanasy redeem
My merged life in the living ocean-stream,
And soul environing of shadowy sea.

FREDERICK W. H. MYERS.

[From A Sea Symphony-Tempest.]
RAND lion-leap of billows! how they fall,
Plunging with hunger to devour the shore!
Hurled mountain of blown billow thwart the wall
Of cliff precipitous bursting with stupendous roar !
Cavernous halls of hoary mountains under
Shake with a shock of subterraneous thunder,
Rumble with roll of long reverberate thunder!
Crushed all the turbid water-mountain toils,

Whose slain, immense, pale, shadowy ghost is thrown

High among hurrying storm-cloud, and recoils
Seethingly, limply plashing on the stone.
While underneath a baffled field of foam,
Poured out disorderly, retreats to rise
One fulvous mass of spume upon a dome
Of wave colossal threatening the skies :
Lo! as it sweeps imperial, the curl
In toppling hangs arrested by a swirl,
Refluent baffled; rears aloft to hurl
All, one grim rampart perpendicular,
Bodily heavenward, whose wrestling froth,
In terrible welter of tumultuous wrath,
Flickers to momentary crags of spar,
Headlong to ruin charges with an ocean jar,
A headlong ruin of water, heard inland afar!

HON. RODEN NOEL.

[From A Sea Symphony-Twilight.]

INFINITE, pale, and dim and desolate,

Monotonous Ocean, with the Voice of Fate, Breathes homeless, helpless, and disconsolate.

HON. R. NOEL.

[From The Children by the Sea.] AH! merry children on the smooth sea sand,

Floating toy-navies, with your spades of wood

Delving until the salt sea-water stand

In moat-like hollows, with a mimic flood

Girdling a mimic fort; or gathering shells

And briny delicate sea-weed; how the air
Blows in glad faces, and the wave compels
Your flight with laughter, leaving a crystal rare
Upon the ripple-pencilled sand! how fair
Life seems, the very weary life we know,

In your exuberant play, that loves to feign
Age has arrived! Ah! life will never glow

For you as now when you are old; remain Children for ever! common things ye deem

Miraculous joy; battle and storm and death, With swift bright gesture, eager eyes, ye dream! Breeze blows bright hair of curled blue billows too; But sparkling waves less merrily dance than you! HON. R. NOEL.

[From At Lyme Regis.]

CALM, azure, marble sea,

As a fair palace pavement largely spread,

Where the gray bastions of the eternal hills

Lean over languidly,

Bosom'd with leafy trees, and garlanded!

Peace is on all I view ;

Sunshine and peace; earth clear as heaven one hour;

Save where the sailing cloud its dusky line

Ruffles along the blue,

Brush'd by the soft wing of the silent shower.

In no profounder calm

Did the great Spirit over ocean brood,

Ere the first hill his yet unclouded crest

Rear'd, or the first fair palm

Doubled her maiden beauty in the flood.

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE.

[From Wind and Wave.]

AND all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,

And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,

T'ward the void sky-line and an unguess'd weal;

Until the vanward billows feel

The agitating shallows, and divine the goal,
And to foam roll,

And spread and stray

And traverse wildly, like delighted hands,

The fair and fleckless sands;

And so the whole

Unfathomable and immense

Triumphing tide comes at the last to reach

And burst in wind-kiss'd splendours on the deaf'ning beach, Where forms of children in first innocence

Laugh and fling pebbles on the rainbow'd crest

Of its untired unrest.

COVENTRY PATMORE.