Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/369

 with a whole array of poems of rare merit, showing how much the poet's mind had matured in that last year at Cambridge. This volume, like the Louth volume, is dated for the year after that in which it was really published. It carried Alfred to the front rank at once, for in it was The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Miller's Daughter, Œnone, ''The May Queen, New Year's Eve, The Lotus Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, and the Lines to James Spedding'', on the death of his brother Edward. Only think of all these wonderful poems in a thin book of 162 pages written before he was twenty-three.

To Mablethorpe and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast we find frequent allusions in many poems, e.g., he speaks in The Last Tournament of "the wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh," and when the Red Knight in drunken passion, trying to strike the King overbalances himself, he falls—

"As the crest of some slow arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table shore, Drops flat, and after, the great waters break Whitening for half-a-league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing."

A most accurate picture of that flat Lincolnshire coast with its "league-long rollers," and hard, wet sands shining in the moonlight. In another place he speaks of "The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea."

In his volume of 1832 there are many pictures drawn from this familiar coast, e.g., in The Lotus Eaters, The Palace of Art, The Dream of Fair Women; and in his 1842 volumes he speaks of

"Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts."

A relative of mine was once reading this poem to the family of one of those Marsh farmers who had known "Mr. Alfred" when a youth, and who lived in the remotest part of that coast near the sandy dunes and far-spread flats between Skegness and "Gibraltar Point"; but she had not got far when at the line—

"Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime, With the fairy tales of science"

she was stopped by the farmer's wife. "Don't you believe him, Miss, there's nothing hereabouts to nourish onybody,