The Tent on the Beach | Page 2

readier lips than his the
good he saw confessed.
His boyhood fancies not outgrown,
He loved himself the singer's art;

Tenderly, gently, by his own
He knew and judged an author's heart.

No Rhadamanthine brow of doom
Bowed the dazed pedant from
his room;
And bards, whose name is legion, if denied,
Bore off
alike intact their verses and their pride.
Pleasant it was to roam about
The lettered world as he had, done,

And see the lords of song without
Their singing robes and garlands
on.
With Wordsworth paddle Rydal mere,
Taste rugged Elliott's
home-brewed beer,
And with the ears of Rogers, at fourscore,
Hear
Garrick's buskined tread and Walpole's wit once more.
And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfil,

Had left the Muses' haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion-mill,

Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war with wrong,

Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough
That beam-deep turned the
soil for truth to spring and grow.
Too quiet seemed the man to ride
The winged Hippogriff Reform;


Was his a voice from side to side
To pierce the tumult of the storm?

A silent, shy, peace-loving man,
He seemed no fiery partisan
To
hold his way against the public frown,
The ban of Church and State,
the fierce mob's hounding down.
For while he wrought with strenuous will
The work his hands had
found to do,
He heard the fitful music still
Of winds that out of
dream-land blew.
The din about him could not drown
What the
strange voices whispered down;
Along his task-field weird
processions swept,
The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped:
The common air was thick with dreams,--
He told them to the toiling
crowd;
Such music as the woods and streams
Sang in his ear he
sang aloud;
In still, shut bays, on windy capes,
He heard the call of
beckoning shapes,
And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,
To
homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.
He rested now his weary hands,
And lightly moralized and laughed,

As, tracing on the shifting sands
A burlesque of his paper-craft,

He saw the careless waves o'errun
His words, as time before had done,

Each day's tide-water washing clean away,
Like letters from the
sand, the work of yesterday.
And one, whose Arab face was tanned
By tropic sun and boreal frost,

So travelled there was scarce a land
Or people left him to exhaust,

In idling mood had from him hurled
The poor squeezed orange of
the world,
And in the tent-shade, as beneath a palm,
Smoked,
cross-legged like a Turk, in Oriental calm.
The very waves that washed the sand
Below him, he had seen before

Whitening the Scandinavian strand
And sultry Mauritanian shore.

From ice-rimmed isles, from summer seas
Palm-fringed, they bore
him messages;
He heard the plaintive Nubian songs again,
And
mule-bells tinkling down the mountain-paths of Spain.

His memory round the ransacked earth
On Puck's long girdle slid at
ease;
And, instant, to the valley's girth
Of mountains, spice isles of
the seas,
Faith flowered in minster stones, Art's guess
At truth and
beauty, found access;
Yet loved the while, that free cosmopolite,

Old friends, old ways, and kept his boyhood's dreams in sight.
Untouched as yet by wealth and pride,
That virgin innocence of beach

No shingly monster, hundred-eyed,
Stared its gray sand-birds out
of reach;
Unhoused, save where, at intervals,
The white tents
showed their canvas walls,
Where brief sojourners, in the cool, soft
air,
Forgot their inland heats, hard toil, and year-long care.
Sometimes along the wheel-deep sand
A one-horse wagon slowly
crawled,
Deep laden with a youthful band,
Whose look some
homestead old recalled;
Brother perchance, and sisters twain,
And
one whose blue eyes told, more plain
Than the free language of her
rosy lip,
Of the still dearer claim of love's relationship.
With cheeks of russet-orchard tint,
The light laugh of their native rills,

The perfume of their garden's mint,
The breezy freedom of the hills,

They bore, in unrestrained delight,
The motto of the Garter's knight,

Careless as if from every gazing thing
Hid by their innocence, as
Gyges by his ring.
The clanging sea-fowl came and went,
The hunter's gun in the
marshes rang;
At nightfall from a neighboring tent
A flute-voiced
woman sweetly sang.
Loose-haired, barefooted, hand-in-hand,

Young girls went tripping down the sand;
And youths and maidens,
sitting in the moon,
Dreamed o'er the old fond dream from which we
wake too soon.
At times their fishing-lines they plied,
With an old Triton at the oar,

Salt as the sea-wind, tough and dried
As a lean cusk from Labrador.

Strange tales he told of wreck and storm,--

Had seen the

sea-snake's awful form,
And heard the ghosts on Haley's Isle
complain,
Speak him off shore, and beg a passage to old Spain!
And there, on breezy morns, they saw
The fishing-schooners outward
run,
Their low-bent sails in tack and flaw
Turned white or dark to
shade and sun.
Sometimes, in calms of closing day,
They watched
the spectral mirage play,
Saw low, far islands looming tall and nigh,

And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky.
Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,
Stooped low upon the
darkening main,
Piercing the waves along its track
With the slant
javelins of rain.
And when west-wind and sunshine warm
Chased
out to sea its wrecks of storm,
They saw the prismy hues in thin spray
showers
Where the