Of tides from the salt sea of human pain
That hiss along the perilous coasts of life
Beat in his eager brain;
But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.
A few stanzas are devoted, as they say in symphonic music, to the ‘working out’ of this similitude in all its aspects. Then in stanza XXII Roberts formally announces the elegiac theme as such:—
Lament, Lerici, mourn the world’s loss!
Mourn that pure light of song extinct at noon!
Roberts develops the lyrical genius of Shelley in eight stanzas, and in the final two stanzas returns to the original theme of the Tantramar marshes where on the inner ear of the Canadian poet
once more