"
These marvellous lines were never more perfectly illustrated than here.
As we read we behold the sea, now crouching like a gigantic tiger, now
moaning with some Celtic consciousness of the grim and loathsome
treasures in its depths, ever haunted and ever haunting. It is probable
that Sharp never wrote anything that had not for his ear an undertone of
the ocean. Sitting in London in his room, he heard, on one occasion, the
sound of waves so loud that he could not hear his wife knocking at the
door. Similarly in Fiona Macleod's writing seas are always rocking and
swinging. Gulfs are opening to disclose the green dim mysteries of the
deeper depths. The wind is running riot with the surface overhead, and
the sea is lord in all its mad glory and wonder and fear.
Mr. Yeats has the same characteristic, but again it is possible to draw
a fantastic distinction like that between the soprano and the alto. It
is lake water rather than the ocean that sounds the under-tone of Mr.
Yeats' poetry--
"I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
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