But inshore here in the shallow,
Embroiled with encumbrance of earth,
Their skirts are turbid and yellow.

III.

The grime of her greed is upon her,
The sign of her deed is her soil;
As the earth's is her own dishonour,

And corruption the crown of her toil :

She hath spoiled and devoured, and her honour
Is this, to be shamed by her spoil.

IV.

But afar, where pollution is none,

Nor sign of strife, nor endeavour,
Where her heart and the suns are one,
And the soil of her sin comes never,
She is pure as the wind and the sun,
And her sweetness endureth for ever.

SWINBURNE.

[From At a Month's End.]

ITH chafe and change of surges chiming,

WITH

The clashing channels rocked and rang

Large music, wave to wild wave timing,
And all the choral water sang.

Faint lights fell this way, that way floated,

Quick sparks of sea-fire keen like eyes,

From the rolled surf that flashed, and noted
Shores and faint cliffs and bays and skies.

The ghost of sea that shrank up sighing,
At the sand's edge, a short sad breath
Trembling to touch the goal, and dying
With weak heart heaved up once in death.

SWINBURNE.

[From In Guernsey.]

Y mother sea, my fostress, what new strand,

MY

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 for ever: 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.

[From Anactoria.]

SWINBURNE.

AND shudder of water that makes felt on land

The immeasurable tremor of all the sea.

SWINBURNE.

K

[From Evenings on the Broad.]

INLAND glimmer the shallows asleep and afar in the

breathless

Twilight: yonder the depths darken afar and asleep. Slowly the semblance of death out of heaven descends on the deathless

Waters hardly the light lives on the face of the deep.

:

SWINBURNE.

[From Tristram of Lyonesse.]

The Sailing of the Swallow.

AND the sea thrilled us with heart-sundering sighs,

One after one drawn, with each breath it drew,

And the green hardened into iron blue,

And the soft light went out of all its face.

SWINBURNE.

[From Tristram of Lyonesse.]

The Queen's Pleasance.

ND all the sea lay subject to the sun.

AN

SWINBURNE.

[From Philip Van Artevelde, Act 1, Sc. x.]

THE weltering of the restless wave.

BREAK, break, break,

SIR HENRY TAYLOR.

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.

[From A Dream of Fair Women.]

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land

Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,

Torn from the fringe of spray.

LORD TENNYSON.

[From The Palace of Art.]

NE show'd an iron coast and angry waves.

ONE

You seem'd to hear them climb and fall And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, Beneath the windy wall.