'TWAS in a sweet nook of the English coast —
It is not now so many years agone —
Where of a Grand Hotel was ne'er a ghost,
Nor of machines for bathing never a one,
But yellow sands lay slanting to the sun
And grew to golden as the day grew done.
The merry wavelets swift came running up
Beribboned with a narrow fringe of cream,
Then raced away as from a canted cup,
While all along the wetted margin-seam,
Like to a rapid fire of gusty joke,
In puffs of glowing prism the bubbles broke.
The upper plates of fragile sea-brought shells,
Like tiny tazzas filled with dips of lymph,
Flecked the gay sands, minute oasis wells,
Each one a tub-bath for a tinier nymph,
While small white molluscs, like Carrara domes,
Of hermit crabs and mite fays were the homes.
The hugest marine monsters of that shore
Were launces lithe and lean, with silvery scales,
Four inches long (which in the silex bore,
Or, swimming snake-like, undulate their tails),
And so ferocious seemed, so glib and gleaming,
They made the shore-fays scuttle off a-screaming.
The largest game were sandpipers, whose feet,
In dancing step, stamped deltas on the sand,
The little creatures, so genteel and fleet,
Hopped a long running race or saraband,
With perky gestures picking up their food —
A comic trait in that sweet solitude.
No obscene raven sought the water-line
To gorge on flotsam, for no ghastly wrack
Came drifting in; no slimy tangles' twine,
Nor odious bladder-weeds, that wilt and crack,
Nor glutinous fibres twined in curling forms,
Like dead men's hair that had been drowned in storms.
The only jetsam was red clover heads,
Or wild rose petals that lewd eastern gales,
In rude wind-play, had ravished from their beds,
And rosy shells like women's finger nails,
And willow pollen, for nought ere unclean
Along high water mark was ever seen.
Within the inner bend the wash was still,
Or gently restless, but, beyond, the lap
Of waves heaved, each a running ridge of hill
That momentary showed its flashing cap,
For 'bout a mile off lay — the chart deponing —
A harbour bar, although it did no moaning.
'Twas said that now and then a nautilus
Had been observed to hoist his purple sail
And put out oars, as if to ferry thus
A passenger or budget of the mail,
And I believe it, for along that coast
'Twas well known that the Fairies had their host.
A cable's length or two at sea there flew
The restless murrs, in floating rings, like hawks
At lesser height, yet still so high, the blue
Softened to mur-mur their harsh strident skwauks,
Which, apropos of nothing, overhead
They gadded garrulously about and said.
Afar at sea, where is the gannet's bath,
The white sails slid, like pageants, to and fro
Upon some definite but trackless path;
While now and then, with faint-heard throb, would go
Some long low ship of steam, black like a coffin,
With along trail of smoke out in the offing.
The north horn of the bay — a giant head,
Was a tall headland of primeval schist
That broke the northern breezes as they sped
And checked and rolled up the land-drifting mist;
The other horn of the half-moon did trend
Down to the sunny south, without an end.
The strip of yellow sand that made the beach
Was backed by a broad stretch of pleasant downs
Of blended colors, far as eye could reach,
As nature paints: greens, purples, russet browns,
And white tree-blossoms set in tid-bit scenes,
And full of gentle dells and small ravines.
Where rose the land the highest on the left
A rift had worn, at some time long ago,
From watershed, till, deep down in the cleft,
A saucy brook of no great width did flow,
And on the sea-marge did its best to make
A slight expansion might be called a lake.
Between the sea and lakelet lay a fall
Some two feet high, a jewel-bright cascade,
That sung, for wantonness, rhyme, trill and call,
And day and night a pleasant concert made,
For chime of tinkling waterdrops in ringing
Made orchestra complete when birds were singing.
Within the lakelet lay a floating isle
Or eyot, of a rood or two, round-edged
And lying low like float upon the Nile,
And it, wherever most the pond was sedged
With waterlilies, anchored most, — the story
Is it had been a peaty promontory,
'Neath which the brook laid cunning water mines
And screwed hydraulic jacks, till, riven up,
The buoyant floor of matted old-time pines
Rose like a bubble or a lotus cup,
And imperceptibly, without a wake,
It drifted back and forth around the lake.
The sheep had nibbled till the turf was short
Of the smooth banks that sloped down to the brim
Of the round lake, which lay down in a sort
Of cone, with margin velvetty and trim,
Baptismal font, or punch-bowl, if you will,
Set in a sward all pied with daffodil.
The waters in this demi-bowl or cup
Changed as does mercury in the weather tube:
When rain fell heavily, the bowl filled up,
And when the droughty sky was dry and rube,
Fell till the yellow gravel-bed was visible,
And fishes flapped in manner quaint and risible.
Oft the belated fairies of the beach,
O'ertaken when the dark too soon came down,
Would skirr along, the floating isle to reach,
And there would each one wrap up in her gown
And slumber snug and sweet, as bird in nest,
Within their island bower on the lake's breast.
For on the base of peat and rotted stems
Was fertile soil, where shady sweet shrubs grew,
And fringe of wildflowers round the thicket's hems,
And carpet of short grass of emerald hue,
Where rest was wooed by the is1e's rocking motion
And lulled by hush-a-bye of mother ocean.
But on a time when 'twas expected least —
One eve, above the sea a sable band
Of watery clouds piled, darkening all the east,
And spreading dense and grey o'er all the land,
Whence dropped, at first, Scotch mist, then sprinkling mizzle,
Which quick augmented into downright drizzle.
Soon outpoured rather water-sheets than rain,
That fell with heavy swish into the lake
And made a hissing when it struck the main,
A new Noachian deluge seemed to break,
And the vexed waters from the lake's swollen face
Ran rushing o'er the ledge-fall like a race.
The fairies waked up in their mossy beds
And wondered what this watery war might mean;
Then with their wings more closely hid their heads
Beneath their water-tight pent-roof of green,
And tried to take another snooze till morning
Till they should see sunrise the scene adorning.
But sudden, savage, in resistless swoop,
The mad wind Eurus, shrilling angry shrieks,
Burst from the east with wild and maniac whoop,
Blowing his breath as he would crack his cheeks,
And — plunging right before the blast — ah me!
The floating isle was carried out to sea!
AT SEA.
STRAIGHT out to sea! upon the ebbing wash
Of a receding wave the light isle slid
With little motion (on the rollers' dash
Aught could have ridden as it buoyant did),
Till sudden caught 'mid the resistless forces
Of the fierce gallop of the white sea-horses.
The shock woke up all hands, and, rudely tossed,
The fairies clung together sore affrighted,
For darkness hid the land that they had lost,
Though shoreward they could see a pharos lighted,
One of those red round eyes that faithful urges
"Beware!" to mariners across the surges.
After long tossing like a dancing feather
Among the wicked foam crests of the breakers,
Whose crash was — (nastiest of dirty weather) —
Enough to crush the ribs of tall three-deckers,
A strong gust swooped upon the isle and caught her
And swept her out beyond the broken water.
There, pitching, rolling, plunging, eke and spinning,
Like a teetotum, or a Norway sloop
Caught in a maelstroëm with the eddies grinning
Their white teeth, the poor fairies on the poop
Gasped short with fear and clasped each other tight
As on they drifted in the lighthouse light.
The red light died, and still the waves rushed by
In dire Cimmerian and Neptunian strife,
For dense there lay alike on wave and sky
Slab blackness one could slice up with a knife,
From out of which their boomed unceasingly
The awful turmoil of the angry sea.
Through the slow creeping hours of dark the swish
Of the seas sweeping by was very eerie,
And when great flakes of foam, like gleaming fish,
Leaped up, the fairies, wet and faint and weary,
Gave up, and as each lurch their terror heightened,
They crouched together, mazed and sad and frightened.
It seemed as if it never would be day —
How many prayers were for the rising sun!
But when day broke 'twas all one steely grey,
And of a glimpse of sunlight there was none,
For all was as if seen through spiders' web,
While like a race before them ran the ebb.
It blew a three days' howling eastern gale;
O thou long-winded Eurus, how it sped!
And meant to keep on blowing, nor to fail,
Until one might discover overhead
A patch of blue (so jack-tar sky-lore teaches),
To make a Hollander a pair of breeches.
When down in the sea-trough the raft subsided,
As to the bottom of a watery pit,
It seemed as from all sides the waters glided
As from a centre, and that not a bit
Of progress made they, rising up and sinking,
But not at all advancing, to their thinking.
They could not see their island move; they thought
The waves that bore them were but rushing by;
Succeeding day and night no changes brought
In the horizon's ring; the selfsame sky
Upon them darkly frowned — all seemed unchanged,
And changelessness inexorable reigned.
Not knowing contrary, they feared that ever
Their raft might wallow on the restless breast
Of cruel ocean, and that never, never
With life remaining could they be at rest.
Despair came, as to tourists in the Channel,
Who call for death, and brandy and hot flannel.
They called for none of these, but crept below
The thickest of the thicket and there burrowed,
While all around graves yawned amid the flow
As if great Neptune's plough the sea-field furrowed;
And, as they crouched there, words could not express
The sense of their exceeding loneliness.
The thing became monotonously dull,
Till from monotony faint hope revived;
The bolder spirits, in some transient lull,
To move upon the green deck bravely strived,
Till ere three days, as if they trod on eggs,
Some few of them had got their weather legs.
This gave the rest encouragement. A saint
Must loud have laughed to see their anxious faces,
It was so very comical and quaint
Their way of tottering round with staggering paces,
As if astride a visionary saddle,
And walking, as do sailormen, astraddle.
The while, though seeming still, they scudded fast
About as many knots as runs a clipper,
Their thicket served as sails upon a mast,
And 'twas a voyage that required no skipper.
Before the gale their buoyant craft was hurled
Due west, as Colon went, to find a world.
I've frequent thought that it is quite a pity
Life does not last for, say, five thousand years
(I mean these words for truth and not for witty),
'Twould take that time to see half that appears
Of the Infinite Love and Beauty that surround us —
But then it is a fleeting life that bounds us.
Man's earliest years are taken up with trifles,
His middle time is slave to divers fashions,
And not till age, remorse, or what not, rifles
His brain of prejudice and heart of passions,
At brightest shines his purer mental spark,
Then, sudden, out the lamp! and all is dark.
These thoughts are apropos how our wrecked fairies
Thought sometimes how their stomachs might be filled,
For though as easy fed as are canaries,
Beneath their belts that worm that won't be stilled,
Called Hunger, hinted to them sundry dishes,
If even 'twere a fry of flying fishes.
'Twas fortunate for them their appetites
Were not at all the kind possessed by gluttons,
Demanding meringues and marinites,
With poultry fricassees, and roasted muttons,
Nor even what seamen deem as things of course,
Hard weevilled biscuit and soft salted horse.
Manna was given them; for though salt the air
And nipping with the salts of flying spray,
Nature's alembic, with alchemy rare,
Distilled and filled their leaf-cups day by day
With fresh sweet dew, nutrition strong and mild,
For Nature ne'er neglects her slightest child.
Some nights were clear and looked down cruel bright,
No sympathy within the starry eyes,
But a cold, baleful, taunting, mocking light,
Till one who had been studying the skies
Cried, after noting the horizon bars,
"See, brothers, see! these are not the same stars!"
After that, as the Arabian shepherds gazed,
They nightly marked the heavenly bodies' places
And noticed how the sea-line had erased
Orb after orb, and that the planet's traces
Were to less orbits circumscribing, proving,
Where'er their isle was going, it was moving.
They judged this by the lower nightly range
Of bold Orion, for his belt lights are
A guide to altitude and other changes
With reference to the changeless polar star,
And to that star in Charles' wain, sans shift,
Once waggoner that gave the Christ a lift.
One evening when the gale had blown its best
And calm had settled on the troubled sky,
There was a tinge of ruby in the west,
As if the morrow would be warm and dry —
The first real burst of sunshine in my story,
For the sun rose up in a gleam of glory.
Then the sea fell. The hectic of the sky
Grew balmy mild, with ambient tints of rose,
And till the shut of eve light clouds slid by,
Throwing great breadths of shadow; the repose
Was almost languor, sunny was the clime,
And so for days it was a lazy time.
Fond memories came to them. Their hearts are warm
With strong attachment to locality;
So in their gentle slumbers would the charm
Of home make them forget they were at sea,
And the great rushing of the waves would seem
The humming of the land brooks in their dream.
To their closed eyes the wide sea seemed a field
Or rolling plain of grass of olive green;
They deemed the distant vapour wreaths concealed
The well-loved features where their haunts had been,
Or seemed but the dim outline of the woods
Or tops of low hills in their morning hoods.
I guess the yarn told to the wedding guest
By Coleridge's ancient marinere
Caused the said guest to cry, "May I be blest
If such a story I did ever hear!"
Yet strange guess-tales fall often from the lips
Of those who go down to the sea in ships.
For instance, once — it was in early dawn —
Our fairies had a terrible alarm,
For near the raft uprose a thing of brawn,
A monstrous, scaley, black and shiny arm,
Then many more arms, then a ghastly creature
Swum up and stared at them with horrid feature.
This was a poulp. Its wicked gleaming eyes
Struck the fays with extremity of terror,
For all believed that truly in this guise
Had come the devil (which was not an error),
To this sea-devil's tricks you'll find a key
In Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea."
Another time our voyagers grew pale,
And that their end had come they never doubted,
For close beside them a huge Greenland whale
Heaved up its mighty body-bulk and spouted;
They thought it was an island with a fountain,
And magnified its size into a mountain.
And, one more time, a snake a furlong long,
A maned and knobby python of the sea,
Swum past; but, halting, coiled in spirals strong,
And reared above them like a thick bent tree,
Then dived and splashed, nor could they in the least
Guess the intentions of the monstrous beast.
One other morning, in the twilight cold,
And drifting right before them to the west,
They saw a strong box, barnacled and old,
That looked as 'twere some shipwrecked seaman's chest,
And might have been, although one thoughtless mocker
Asserted it was Davie Jones, his locker.
On crispy nights, from out of cloud there loomed
Broad sheets of silver, rose and pale green tinges,
Through which a stream of fiery arrows flumed
In flame that softened off to quivering fringes,
As in their antic djereed play came forth
The merry dances of the polar north.
Another time the sultry summer sheen
Piled up the clouds in one of ocean's changes,
And lo! a stately transformation scene, —
The still sea circled round by mountain ranges!
Like a vast lake among the Rhœtian alps,
What time the rose-snow lies upon their scalps.
One midnight, as the moon rose soft, serene.
Music came softly stealing o'er the brine,
And caused the fays to marvel what could mean
From out the sea to come a voice so fine,
Such melancholy tone of feeling bringing?
The fact is that it was a mermaid singing.
One day bore down on them a hill of light,
An alp of crystal, pinnacled and towered,
A berg of ice of purest dazzling white,
With points all diamond-glittering, caved, and bowered,
A mountain island in its lone weird glory,
With many a shining cape and promontory.
Its summit reached the clouds, its crystal hue
Unbroken save one dark spot in a rift,
What that might be none of the fairies knew
(A dead man, or a polar bear adrift);
Majestically grand the berg, untossed,
Slow drifted southward stealthy as a ghost.
How many dead are hidden in the womb
Of thy engulphing and remorseless waves,
O seal at once the murderer and tomb;
If all thy victims came from out thy caves
And shipped as deck-hands, they would much too much man
That weird old galleon called the Flying Dutchman —
A ship that I believe in, for I know
A ten-gun brig of France to-day that cruises
In the St. Lawrence Gulf, but long ago
Went down with all hands in the quicksands' oozes,
But oft comes up again 'twixt suns and suns
With all her gunners standing by their guns.
Ah! who can trust wind, wave — still less the two,
For one night, in a sky of copper yellow
The sun set lurid, the waves took the cue,
And all the winds of heaven began to bellow,
And sea-gods, meaning mischief, 'gan to snort
And toss their heads in wild Neptunian sport.
And, as the waves grew frolicsome and high,
A number of small birds around them came,
Never alighting, but would rapid fly
Along the mountain rollers, near and tame;
Some call them Stormy Peters, but one fairy
Thought they were chicks belonged to Mrs. Carey.
Sudden the long-pent threatened tempest burst
With discord, as if demon hosts were shrieking;
The powers of evil joyed to wreck their worst
And set old ocean like a caldron reeking
And writhing in the spasms fierce and frantic
Of a wild night storm in the mid-Atlantic.
Description fails. Suffice it here to tell
The buoyant fairy raft rode out the gale;
But how, amid that troubled watery hell,
It, or a Nautilus, should, under sail,
Float while ships sink, I really cannot say,
But float did it, and kept upon its way.
The stoutest war-boat ever built by hands
Is feeble at such time as floating chip,
The mite called Man plans, but the Sea commands;
Coward and brave alike in strongest ship
Fall prostrate, and acknowledge reverently
God of the elements in storm at sea.
And so our fairies' floating raft of peat
Rode out the storm where navies would have shattered,
It ran before the tempest light and fleet;
No damage, but the shrubs a good deal battered;
But our crew thought the lot of tinker, tailor,
Was preferable to the role of sailor.
Joy to the castaways! for came in view
A broad-beamed, homeward-bounden English craft,
That, till the gale blew out, was lying-to
With a small rag of mainsheet close-reefed aft;
Their quick eyes scanned her stern, and in the lull
They read her name — the "Bonny Lass of Hull."
Her skipper spied the raft, and thought to send
The second mate, with two bands, in the longboat,
But second thoughts induced him to amend
Lest he should find himself quite in the wrong boat;
He therefore merely entered in the log:
"Lon. 50.59, passed floating bog."
For some days our adventurous fairy crew
Had seen a change of color in the tide,
The seas were shorter, of a muddier hue,
And broke with greater wash and surf beside,
Because, in fact, they now had reached the gorges
Of the fish banks that fishers call the Georges.
A fog here shut them in, fog dense and dank,
Through which they heard men halloo and ply oars,
And once a sharp puff partly raised the bank,
When round them, lo! were fishing boats in scores
An instant seen, and one smart codding-man
Cried he had seen a floating catamaran.
A few days more they drifted, ever west,
Where seabirds now would fly around and swim,
And the air freshened more, from which they guessed
Land near — indeed they saw its outlines dim
Lie low like smoke, till one elf at the prow
Sung out, "A stretch of land on the lee bow!"
A long low line of beach, with crest of trees,
With openings of rich verdure, emerald hued,
And as the string o' the tide and landward breeze
Wafted them nearer, in a thankful mood
They blessed the land and beach of ruddy brown,
And off the shore lay bobbing up and down.
Now this fair land was Epaygooyat* called,
An isle of golden grain and healthful clime,
With vast fish-teeming waters, ocean-walled,
The smallest Province of the Maritime.
Up on the beach the Fairies' Raft was cast,
And on Canadian land stuck hard and fast.