The Tent on the Beach | Page 2

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 green buds of waves burst into white froth flowers.
And when along the line of shore?The mists crept upward chill and damp,?Stretched, careless, on their sandy floor?Beneath the flaring lantern lamp,?They talked of all things old and new,?Read, slept, and dreamed as idlers do;?And