Slowly, gladly, full of peace and wonder

Grows his heart who journeys here alone.
Earth and all its thoughts of earth sink under
Deep as deep in water sinks a stone.
Hardly knows it if the rollers thunder,
Hardly whence the lonely wind is blown.

Tall the plumage of the rush-flower tosses,
Sharp and soft in many a curve and line
Gleam and glow the sea-coloured marsh-mosses,
Salt and splendid from the circling brine.
Streak on streak of glimmering seashine crosses
All the land sea-saturate as with wine.

Far, and far between, in divers orders,

Clear grey steeples cleave the low grey sky; Fast and firm as time-unshaken warders,

Hearts made sure by faith, by hope made high. These alone in all the wild sea-borders

Fear no blast of days and nights that die.

All the land is like as one man's face is,

Pale and troubled still with change of cares. Doubt and death pervade her clouded spaces: Strength and length of life and peace are theirs; Theirs alone amid these weary places,

Seeing not how the wild world frets and fares.

Firm and fast where all is cloud that changes
Cloud-clogged sunlight, cloud by sunlight thinned,
Stern and sweet, above the sand-hill ranges

Watch the towers and tombs of men that sinned. Once, now calm as earth whose only change is

Wind, and light, and wind, and cloud, and wind.

Out and in and out the sharp straits wander,
In and out and in the wild way strives,

Starred and paved and lined with flowers that squander Gold as golden as the gold of hives,

Salt and moist and multiform: but yonder,

See, what sign of life or death survives?

Seen then only when the songs of olden

Harps were young whose echoes yet endure, Hymned of Homer when his years were golden, Known of only when the world was pure, Here is Hades, manifest, beholden,

Surely, surely here, if aught be sure!

Where the border-line was crossed, that, sundering
Death from life, keeps weariness from rest,
None can tell, who fares here forward wondering;
None may doubt but here might end his quest.
Here life's lightning joys and woes once thundering
Sea-like round him cease like storm suppressed.

Here the wise wave-wandering steadfast-hearted
Guest of many a lord of many a land
Saw the shape or shade of years departed,
Saw the semblance risen and hard at hand,
Saw the mother long from love's reach parted,
Anticleia, like a statue stand.

Statue? nay, nor tissued image woven
Fair on hangings in his father's hall;
Nay, too fast her faith of heart was proven,
Far too firm her loveliest love of all;
Love wherethrough the loving heart was cloven,
Love that hears not when the loud Fates call.

Love that lives and stands up re-created

Then when life has ebbed and anguish fled;
Love more strong than death or all things fated,
Child's and mother's, lit by love and led;
Love that found what life so long awaited
Here, when life came down among the dead.

Here, where never came alive another,

Came her son across the sundering tide
Crossed before by many a warrior brother
Once that warred on Ilion at his side;
Here spread forth vain hands to clasp the mother
Dead, that sorrowing for his love's sake died.

Parted, though by narrowest of divisions,

Clasp he might not, only might implore, Sundered yet by bitterest of derisions,

Son, and mother from the son she boreHere? But all dispeopled here of visions

Lies, forlorn of shadows even, the shore.

All too sweet such men's Hellenic speech is,
All too fain they lived of light to see,
Once to see the darkness of these beaches,
Once to sing this Hades found of me
Ghostless, all its gulfs and creeks and reaches,
Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea.

IN THE WATER.

[A Midsummer Holiday etc. 1884.]

THE sea is awake, and the sound of the song of the joy of her waking is rolled

From afar to the star that recedes, from anear to the wastes of the wild wide shore.

Her call is a trumpet compelling us homeward: if dawn in her east be acold,

From the sea shall we crave not her grace to rekindle the life that it kindled before,

Her breath to requicken, her bosom to rock us, her kisses to bless as of yore?

For the wind, with his wings half open, at pause in the sky, neither fettered nor free,

Leans waveward and flutters the ripple to laughter: and fain would the twain of us be

Where lightly the wave yearns forward from under the curve of the deep dawn's dome,

And, full of the morning and fired with the pride of the glory thereof and the glee,

Strike out from the shore as the heart in us bids and beseeches, athirst for the foam.

Life holds not an hour that is better to live in: the past is a tale that is told,

The future a sun-flecked shadow, alive and asleep, with a blessing in store.

As we give us again to the waters, the rapture of limbs that the waters enfold

Is less than the rapture of spirit whereby, though the burden it quits were sore,

Our souls and the bodies they wield at their will are absorbed in the life they adore

In the life that endures no burden, and bows not the forehead, and bends not the knee

In the life everlasting of earth and of heaven, in the laws that atone and agree,

In the measureless music of things, in the fervour of forces that rest or that roam,

That cross and return and reissue, as I after you and as you after me

Strike out from the shore as the heart in us bids and beseeches, athirst for the foam.

For, albeit he were less than the least of them, haply the heart of a man may be bold

To rejoice in the word of the sea as a mother's that saith to the son she bore,

Child, was not the life in thee mine, and my spirit the breath in thy lips from of old?

Have I let not thy weakness exult in my strength, and thy foolishness learn of my lore?

Have I helped not or healed not thine anguish, or made not the might of thy gladness more?

And surely his heart should answer, The light of the love of my life is in thee.

She is fairer than earth, and the sun is not fairer, the wind is not blither than she:

From my youth hath she shown me the joy of her bays that I crossed, of her cliffs that I clomb,

Till now that the twain of us here, in desire of the dawn and in trust of the sea,

Strike out from the shore as the heart in us bids and beseeches, athirst for the foam.

Friend, earth is a harbour of refuge for winter, a covert whereunder to flee

When day is the vassal of night, and the strength of the hosts of her mightier than he;

But here is the presence adored of me, here my desire is at rest and at home.

There are cliffs to be climbed upon land, there are ways to be trodden and ridden: but we

Strike out from the shore as the heart in us bids and beseeches, athirst for the foam.