1877 X THE sea is full of wandering foam, The sky of driving cloud; My restless thoughts among them roam . . . The night is dark and loud. Where are the hours that came to me So beautiful and bright? A wild wind shakes the wilder sea . . . O, dark and loud’s the night! 1876 XI _To_ W. R. THICK is the darkness— Sunward, O, sunward! Rough is the highway— Onward, still onward! Dawn harbours surely East of the shadows. Facing us somewhere Spread the sweet meadows. Upward and forward! Time will restore us: Light is above us, Rest is before us. 1876 XII TO me at my fifth-floor window The chimney-pots in rows Are sets of pipes pandean For every wind that blows; And the smoke that whirls and eddies In a thousand times and keys Is really a visible music Set to my reveries. O monstrous pipes, melodious With fitful tune and dream, The clouds are your only audience, Her thought is your only theme! 1875 XIII BRING her again, O western wind, Over the western sea: Gentle and good and fair and kind, Bring her again to me! Not that her fancy holds me dear, Not that a hope may be: Only that I may know her near, Wind of the western sea. 1875 XIV THE wan sun westers, faint and slow; The eastern distance glimmers gray; An eerie haze comes creeping low Across the little, lonely bay; And from the sky-line far away About the quiet heaven are spread Mysterious hints of dying day, Thin, delicate dreams of green and red. And weak, reluctant surges lap And rustle round and down the strand. No other sound . . . If it should hap, The ship that sails from fairy-land! The silken shrouds with spells are manned, The hull is magically scrolled, The squat mast lives, and in the sand The gold prow-griffin claws a hold. It steals to seaward silently; Strange fish-folk follow thro’ the gloom; Great wings flap overhead; I see The Castle of the Drowsy Doom Vague thro’ the changeless twilight loom, Enchanted, hushed. And ever there She slumbers in eternal bloom, Her cushions hid with golden hair. 1875 XV THERE is a wheel inside my head Of wantonness and wine, An old, cracked fiddle is begging without, But the wind with scents of the sea is fed, And the sun seems glad to shine.