SELF-STUDY. A PRESENCE both by night and day, That made my life seem just begun, Yet scarce a presence, rather say The warning aureole of one. And yet I felt it everywhere; How sweet it was! A buttercup Who was the nymph? Nay, I will see, So every magic art I tried, I turned to clasp her, but "Farewell," Not by my hand the curtain fell Gasping under titanic ferns; Granite shoulders and boulders and snags, Round which, though the winds in heaven be shut, The nightmared ocean murmurs and yearns, Welters, and swashes, and tosses, and turns, And the dreary black sea-weed lolls and wags; Only rock from shore to shore, Only a moan through the bleak clefts blown, With sobs in the rifts where the coarse kelp shifts, Falling and lifting, tossing and drifting, And the dread of some nameless thing unknown, These make Appledore. These make Appledore by night: There they lie for half a mile, If you look long, they seem to be moving Just as plainly as plain can be, Crushing and crowding, wading and shoving Out into the awful sea, Where you can hear them snort and Two rocky bulges, one at each end, With a smaller bulge and a hollow between; Patches of whortleberry and bay; Sprinkled with loose slabs square and gray, Like graveyards for ages deserted; a few Unsocial thistles; an elder or two, Foamed over with blossoms white as spray ; And on the whole island never a tree Save a score of sumachs, high as your knee, That crouch in hollows where they may, (The cellars where once stood a village, men say,) Huddling for warmth, and never grew Up or down at you everywhere; With short, sharp scream, as he sights his prey, And, dropping straight and swift as lead, Splits the water with sudden thud; — A common island, you will say; Dilating slowly as you win A sense from the silence to take it in. So wide the loneness, so lucid the air, The granite beneath you so savagely bare, You well might think you were looking down From some sky-silenced mountain's crown, Whose far-down pines are wont to tear For Grandeur is inaccessibly proud, Who hunt down sunsets, and huddle and bay, Mouthing and mumbling the dying day. Trust me, 't is something to be cast From the singular mess we agree to call Where that is best which the most fools vote is, And to be set down on one's own two feet So nigh to the great warm heart of You almost seem to feel it beat the sod; To be compelled, as it were, to notice All the beautiful changes and chances Through which the landscape flits and glances, And to see how the face of common day Is written all over with tender histories, When you study it that intenser way In which a lover looks at his mistress. Till now you dreamed not what could be done With a bit of rock and a ray of sun; The yellow sunbeams pause and creep ! Now pink it blooms, now glimmers gray, Now shadows to a filmy blue, Tries one, tries all, and will not stay, And runs through every tenderest range Indifferent of worst or best, Enchants the cliffs with wraiths and hints And gracious preludings of tints, III. Away northeast is Boone Island light; Wherewith the lonely farmer tames 'T is well he could not contrive to make Unconvertibly savage, and scorns to take The white man's baptism or his ways. Him first on shore the coaster divines Through the early gray, and sees him shake The morning mist from his scalp-lock of pines; Him first the skipper makes out in the west, Ere the earliest sunstreak shoots trem- As if it were the name of a saint. Look along over the low right shoulder By half an hour, you will lose it and find it A score of times; while you look 't is gone, And, just as you 've given it up, anon It is there again, till your weary eyes Fancy they see it waver and rise, With its brother clouds; it is Agiochook, There if you seek not, and gone if you look, Ninety miles off as the eagle flies. But mountains make not all the shore The main-land shows to Appledore ; Eight miles the heaving water spreads To a long low coast with beaches and heads That run through unimagined mazes, As the lights and shades and magical hazes Put them away or bring them near, Shimmering, sketched out for thirty miles Between two capes that waver like threads, And sink in the ocean, and reappear, Crumbled and melted to little isles, With filmy trees, that seem the mere Half-fancies of drowsy atmosphere; Eastward as far as the eye can see, And beyond, you fancy it sloping until And the clumsy junk and proa lie Sunk deep with precious woods and nard, 'Mid the palmy isles of the Orient. Those leaning towers of clouded On the farthest brink of doubtful ocean, Will rise again, the great world under, First films, then towers, then highheaped clouds, |