A home to twine with fancy, feeling, thought,
As with sweet flowers. But chasten’d hope for this
Now turns from earth’s green valleys, as from thee,
To that sole changeless world, where “there is no more sea.”[433]
[433] [The sight and sound of the sea were always connected in her mind with melancholy associations; with
“Doubt, and something dark.
Of the old sea some reverential fear;”
with images of storm and desolation, of shipwreck and sea-burial: the last, indeed, was so often present to her imagination, and has so frequently been introduced into her poetry, that any one inclined to superstitious presentiments might almost have been disposed to fancy it a foreshadowing of some such dark fate in store either for herself or for some one dear to her. These associations, like those awakened by the wind, were perfectly distinct from any thing of personal timidity, and were the more indefinable, as she had never suffered any calamity at all connected with the sea: none of those she loved had been consigned to its reckless waters, nor had she ever seen it in all its terrors, for the coast on which her early years were passed is by no means a rugged or dangerous one, and is seldom visited by disaster.
“Are all these notes in thee, wild wind! these many notes in thee? Far in our own unfathom’d souls their fount must surely be; Yes! buried, but unsleeping there, thought watches, memory lies, From whose deep urn the tones are poured through all earth’s harmonies.”
In one of her later sonnets on this subject, a chord is struck which may perhaps find an echo in other bosoms:—