The Chinese lantern lady said something, then the red-faced man. But the conversation had ceased to be articulately audible. Soon I could hear no more; they had gone, leaving behind them, however, the name of Shelley. It was here, along these waters, that he had sailed his flimsy boat. In one hand he held his Sophocles, with the other the tiller. His eyes looked now at the small Greek letters, now to the horizon, or landwards towards the mountains and clouds. “Port your helm, Shelley,” Captain Williams would shout. And the helm went hard over to starboard; the ship staggered, almost capsised. Then, one day, flash! the black opaque sky split right across; crash and rumble! the thunder exploded overhead and with the noise of boulders being trundled over the surface of the metal clouds, the echoes rolled about the heavens and among the mountains—“from peak to peak,” it occurred to me, adopting the Chinese lantern lady’s emendation, “from peak to peak with a gong-like squeak.” (What an infamy!) And then, with a hiss and a roar, the whirl-blast was upon them. It was all over. Even without the Chinese lantern lady’s hint I should probably have started thinking of Shelley. For to live on this coast, between the sea and the mountains, among alternate flawless calms and shattering sudden storms, is like living inside one of Shelley’s poems. One walks through a transparent and phantasmagorical beauty. But for the hundred thousand bathers, the jazz band in the Grand Hotel, the unbroken front which civilisation, in the form of boarding-houses, presents for miles at a time to the alien and empty sea, but for all these, one might seriously lose one’s sense of reality and imagine that fancy had managed to transform itself into fact. In Shelley’s days, when the coast was all but uninhabited, a man might have had some excuse for forgetting the real nature of things. Living here in an actual world practically indistinguishable from one of imagination, a man might almost be justified for indulging his fancy to the extravagant lengths to which Shelley permitted his to go. But a man of the present generation, brought up in typical contemporary surroundings, has no justifications of this sort. A modern poet cannot permit himself the mental luxuries in which his predecessors so freely wallowed. Lying there on the water, I repeated to myself a copy of verses, inspired by reflections like these, which I had written some few months before. The Holy Ghost comes sliding down On Ilford, Golders Green and Penge. His hosts infect him as they rot; The victims take their just revenge. For if of old the sons of squires And livery stable keepers turned To flowers and hope, to Greece and God, We in our later age have learned