Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing.”
A most accurate picture of that flat Lincolnshire coast with its “league-long rollers,” and hard, wet sands shining in the moonlight. In another place he speaks of “The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea.”
In his volume of 1832 there are many pictures drawn from this familiar coast, e.g., in The Lotus Eaters, The Palace of Art, The Dream of Fair Women; and in his 1842 volumes he speaks of
“Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts.”
A relative of mine was once reading this poem to the family of one of those Marsh farmers who had known “Mr. Alfred” when a youth, and who lived in the remotest part of that coast near the sandy dunes and far-spread flats between Skegness and “Gibraltar Point”; but she had not got far when at the line—
“Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime,
With the fairy tales of science——”
she was stopped by the farmer’s wife. “Don’t you believe him, Miss, there’s nothing hereabouts to nourish onybody, ’cepting it be an owd rabbit, and it ain’t oftens you can get howd of them.”
IN MEMORIAM