Choughs are rare at Beachy Head, but jackdaws and gulls are in great and noisy profusion; and this reminds me that it was on Beachy Head in September, 1886, that the inspiration of one of the most beautiful bird-poems in our language came to its author—the ode "To a Seamew" of Mr. Swinburne. I quote five of its haunting stanzas:
We, sons and sires of seamen,
Whose home is all the sea,
What place man may, we claim it;
But thine——whose thought may name it?
Free birds live higher than freemen,
And gladlier ye than we——
We, sons and sires of seamen,
Whose home is all the sea.
For you the storm sounds only