The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Is there a solitary wretch who hies To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow, And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes Its distance from the waves that chide below; 5 Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf, With hoarse, half-utter'd lamentation, lies

1. Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, The wall, which once surrounded the churchyard, in Sussex, containing only two or three houses. is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken There were formerly several acres of ground up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into between its small church and the sea, which now, the sea: whence human bones are found among by its continual encroachments, approaches within the sand and shingles on the shore [Smith's note]. a few feet of this half ruined and humble edifice.

 .

42 / CHARLOTTE SMITH

Murmuring responses to the dashing surf? In moody sadness, on the giddy brink, 10

I see him more with envy than with fear; He has no nice felicities that shrink1

From giant horrors; wildly wandering here, He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know The depth or the duration of his woe.

1797

The Sea View1

The upland shepherd, as reclined he lies On the soft turf that clothes the mountain brow, Marks the bright sea-line mingling with the skies; Or from his course celestial, sinking slow, 5 The summer-sun in purple radiance low, Blaze on the western waters; the wide scene Magnificent, and tranquil, seems to spread Even o'er the rustic's breast a joy serene, When, like dark plague-spots by the Demons shed,

10 Charged deep with death, upon the waves, far seen, Move the war-freighted ships; and fierce and red, Flash their destructive fire.�The mangled dead

And dying victims then pollute the flood. Ah! thus man spoils Heaven's glorious works with blood!

1797

The Emigrants1

From Book 1

scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex.

time, a Morning in November, 1792.

Slow in the Wintry Morn, the struggling light Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves;

1. " Tis delicate felicity that shrinks / when rock-tion of the system that had sanctioned their social ing winds are loud." Walpole [Smith's note; the privilege. It is set, as Smith indicates, in November passage from Walpole has not been identified]. 1792, just after the downfall of the French mon1. Suggested by the recollection of having seen, archy and the declaration of a Republic. Its "scene" some years since, on a beautiful evening of Sum-is atop the cliffs at Brighthelmstone (Brighton), mer, an engagement between two armed ships, across the Channel from France. Book 2, set five from the high down called the Beacon Hill, near months later, at a time following the execution of Brighthelmstone [Smith's note, referring to a loca-Louis XVI and the outbreak of war between Britain tion near Brighton]. and France, narrates how the emigrants, forming 1. As the Revolution unfolded in France, growing a counterrevolutionary army, invade France to numbers of aristocrats, aghast at their loss of wage war on their own countrymen. Here Smith power and increasingly in fear for their lives, aban-emphasizes the situation of the women this fooldoned their estates and riches and sought refuge hardy army leaves behind, abandoned to an in England. Following the new Republic's abolition unwanted independence in a strange land. of state religion and confiscation of Church lands, Smith dedicated The Emigrants to William Cow- these nobles were joined in their exile by Catholic per, whose easy, informal blank verse in The Task clerics. Book 1 of The Emigrants traces how these (1785) was an immediate influence on her own. people cope, and fail to cope, with the disintegra

 .

THE EMIGRANTS / 43

Their foaming tops, as they approach the shore

And the broad surf that never ceasing breaks On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives To this cold northern Isle, its shorten'd day. Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy! How many murmur at oblivious night

For leaving them so soon; for bearing thus Their fancied bliss (the only bliss they taste!), On her black wings away!�Changing0 the dreams exchanging That sooth'd their sorrows, for calamities (And every day brings its own sad proportion)

For doubts, diseases, abject dread of Death, And faithless friends, and fame and fortune lost; Fancied or real wants; and wounded pride, That views the day star,0 but to curse his beams. the sun

Yet He, whose Spirit into being call'd This wondrous World of Waters; He who bids The wild wind lift them till they dash the clouds, And speaks to them in thunder; or whose breath, Low murmuring o'er the gently heaving tides, When the fair Moon, in summer night serene,

Irradiates with long trembling lines of light Their undulating surface; that great Power, Who, governing the Planets, also knows If but a Sea-Mew falls, whose nest is hid In these incumbent0 cliffs; He surely means overhanging