PICTURES FROM APPLEDORE. I. A HEAP of bare and splintery crags Tumbled about by lightning and frost, With rifts and chasms and stormbleached jags, That wait and growl for a ship to be lost; No island, but rather the skeleton one, Where, æons ago, with half-shut eye, 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, These make Appledore. These make Appledore by night: There they lie for half a mile, And (though you know they never once stir), If you look long, they seem to moving Just as plainly as plain can be, be A common island, you will say; But stay a moment: only climb Up to the highest rock of the isle, Crushing and crowding, wading and Stand there alone for a little while, shoving Out into the awful sea, And with gentle approaches it grows sublime, Where you can hear them snort and Dilating slowly as you win spout A sens 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 waist-belt of pines is wont to tear For Grandeur is inaccessibly proud, |O'er which, through color's dreamiest The musing sunbeams pause and creep! That she, Cothurnus-shod, stand bowed Indifferent of worst or best, Until the self-approving pit In babbling plaudits cheaply loud; Who hunt down sunsets, and huddle 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 And planted firm on one's own two feet So nigh to the great warm heart of God, To be compelled, as it were, to notice And to see how the face of common day Enchants the cliffs with wraiths and hints And gracious preludings of tints, Perpetual movement with perpetual rest! III. Away northeast is Boone Island light; Wherewith the lonely farmer tames Till now you dreamed not what could 'T is well he could not contrive to make be done With a bit of rock and a ray of sun; A Saxon of Agamenticus: He glowers there to the north of us, 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 tremulous, Plashing with orange the palpitant lines 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 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 mainland 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, With the flashing flails of weariless seas, How it lifts and looms to a precipice, Eastward as far as the eye can see, In ripples of orange and pink are sent Where the poppied sails doze on the yard, And the clumsy junk and proa lie Mid the palmy isles of the Orient. Will rise again, the great world under, First films, then towers, then highheaped clouds, Whose nearing outlines sharpen slowly near, Chilling your fancy to the core? V. How looks Appledore in a storm? I have seen it when its crags seemed frantic, Butting against the mad Atlantic, When surge on surge would heap enorme, Cliffs of emerald topped with snow, That lifted and lifted, and then let go A great white avalanche of thunder, A grinding, blinding, deafening ire Monadnock might have trembled under; And the island, whose rock-roots pierce below To where they are warmed with the central fire, Then a mile or more of rushing sea, And then the lighthouse slim and lone; And whenever the weight of ocean is thrown Full and fair on White Island head, That seems to shrink and shorten and Till the monster's arms of a sudden drop, And silently and fruitlessly He sinks back into the sea. You could feel its granite fibres racked, You, meanwhile, where drenched you As it seemed to plunge with a shudder and thrill Right at the breast of the swooping hill, And to rise again snorting a cataract Of rage-froth from every cranny and ledge, While the sea drew its breath in hoarse and deep, And the next vast breaker curled its edge, Gathering itself for a mightier leap. North, east, and south there are reefs and breakers You would never dream of in smooth weather, That toss and gore the sea for acres, Bellowing and gnashing and snarling together; Look northward, where Duck Island lies, As if the moon should suddenly kiss, While you crossed the gusty desert by night, The long colonnades of Persepolis; Look southward for White Island light, The lantern stands ninety feet o'er the tide; There is first a half-mile of tumult and fight, Of dash and roar and tumble and fright, And surging bewilderment wild and wide, Where the breakers struggle left and right, stand, |