Excerpt
THE TENT ON THE BEACH
It can scarcely be necessary to name as the two companions whom I reckoned with myself in this poetical picnic, Fields the lettered magnate, and Taylor the free cosmopolite. The long line of sandy beach which defines almost the whole of the New Hampshire sea-coast is especially marked near its southern extremity, by the salt-meadows of Hampton. The Hampton River winds through these meadows, and the reader may, if he choose, imagine my tent pitched near its mouth, where also was the scene of the Wreck of Rivermouth. The green bluff to the northward is Great Boar's Head; southward is the Merrimac, with Newburyport lifting its steeples above brown roofs and green trees on banks.
I would not sin, in this half-playful strain,—Too light perhaps for serious years, though bornOf the enforced leisure of slow pain,—Against the pure ideal which has drawnMy feet to follow its far-shining gleam.A simple plot is mine: legends and runesOf credulous days, old fancies that have lainSilent, from boyhood taking voice again,Warmed into life once more, even as the tunesThat, frozen in the fabled hunting-horn,Thawed into sound:—a winter fireside dreamOf dawns and-sunsets by the summer sea,Whose sands are traversed by a silent throngOf voyagers from that vaster mysteryOf which it is an emblem;—and the dearMemory of one who might have tuned my songTo sweeter music by her delicate ear.
When heats as of a tropic climeBurned all our inland valleys through,Three friends, the guests of summer time,Pitched their white tent where sea-winds blew.Behind them, marshes, seamed and crossedWith narrow creeks, and flower-embossed,Stretched to the dark oak wood, whose leafy armsScreened from the stormy East the pleasant inland farms.
At full of tide their bolder shoreOf sun-bleached sand the waters beat;At ebb, a smooth and glistening floorThey touched with light, receding feet.Northward a 'green bluff broke the chainOf sand-hills; southward stretched a plainOf salt grass, with a river winding down,Sail-whitened, and beyond the steeples of the town,
Whence sometimes, when the wind was lightAnd dull the thunder of the beach,They heard the bells of morn and nightSwing, miles away, their silver speech.Above low scarp and turf-grown wallThey saw the fort-flag rise and fall;And, the first star to signal twilight's hour,The lamp-fire glimmer down from the tall light-house tower.
They rested there, escaped awhileFrom cares that wear the life away,To eat the lotus of the NileAnd drink the poppies of Cathay,—To fling their loads of custom down,Like drift-weed, on the sand-slopes brown,And in the sea waves drown the restless packOf duties, claims, and needs that barked upon their track.
One, with his beard scarce silvered, boreA ready credence in his looks,A lettered magnate, lording o'erAn ever-widening realm of books.In him brain-currents, near and far,Converged as in a Leyden jar;The old, dead authors thronged him round about,And Elzevir's gray ghosts from leathern graves looked out....