A Greyport Legend.

(1797.)

THEY ran through the streets of the seaport town,
They peered from the decks of the ships that lay;
The cold sea-fog that came whitening down
Was never as cold or white as they.

"Ho, Starbuck and Pinckney and Tenterden !
Run for your shallops, gather your men,

Scatter your boats on the lower bay.

Good cause for fear! In the thick mid-day
The hulk that lay by the rotting pier,
Filled with the children in happy play,
Parted its moorings and drifted clear,-
Drifted clear beyond the reach or call,-
Thirteen children they were in all,-
All adrift in the lower bay!

Said a hard-faced skipper, "God help us all!
She will not float till the turning tide!"
Said his wife, "My darling will hear my call,
Whether in sea or heaven she bide,"

And she lifted a quavering voice and high,
Wild and strange as a sea-bird's cry,

Till they shuddered and wondered at her side.

The fog drove down on each labouring crew,
Veiled each from each and the sky and shore:
There was not a sound but the breath they drew,
And the lap of water and creak of oar ;

And they felt the breath of the downs, fresh blown
O'er leagues of clover and cold grey stone,

But not from the lips that had gone before.

They come no more.

But they tell the tale,

That, when fogs are thick on the harbour reef,

The mackerel fishers shorten sail;

For the signal they know will bring relief:

For the voices of children, stili at play

In a phantom hulk that drifts alway

Through channels whose waters never fail

It is but a foolish shipman's tale,
A theme for a poet's idle page;

But still, when the mists of doubt prevail,
And we lie becalmed by the shores of Age,
We hear from the misty troubled shore
The voice of the children gone before,
Drawing the soul to its anchorage.

THEY

say

A Newport Romance.

that she died of a broken heart

(I tell the tale as 'twas told to me); But her spirit lives, and her soul is part Of this sad old house by the sea.

Her lover was fickle and fine and French:
It was nearly a hundred years ago

When he sailed away from her arms-poor wench !—
With the Admiral Rochambeau.

I marvel much what periwigged phrase
Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker.

At what golden-laced speech of those modish days
She listened the mischief take her!

But she kept the posies of mignonette

That he gave; and ever as their bloom failed
And faded (though with her tears still wet)
Her youth with their own exhaled.

Till one night, when the sea-fog wrapped a shroud Round spar and spire and tarn and tree,

Her soul went up on that lifted cloud

From this sad old house by the sea.

And ever since then, when the clock strikes two,
She walks unbidden from room to room,
And the air is filled that she passes through
With a subtle, sad perfume.

The delicate odour of mignonette,

The ghost of a dead and gone bouquet,

Is all that tells of her story; yet,

Could she think of a sweeter way?

I sit in the sad old house to-night,-
Myself a ghost from a farther sea;
And I trust that this Quaker woman might,
In courtesy, visit me.

For the laugh is fled from porch and lawn,
And the bugle died from the fort on the hill,
And the twitter of girls on the stairs is gone,
And the grand piano is still.

Somewhere in the darkness a clock strikes two;
And there is no sound in the sad old house,
But the long veranda dripping with dew,
And in the wainscot a mouse.

The light of my study-lamp streams out

From the library door, but has gone astray

In the depths of the darkened hall.

But the Quakeress knows the way.

Small doubt

Was it the trick of a sense o'erwrought
With outward watching and inward fret?
But I swear that the air just now was fraught
With the odour of mignonette!