On Being Cautioned against Walking / 41
5 In deep depression sunk, the enfeebled mind Will to the deaf cold elements complain, And tell the embosom'd grief, however vain,
To sullen surges and the viewless wind. Though no repose on thy dark breast I find, 10 I still enjoy thee?cheerless as thou art;
For in thy quiet gloom the exhausted heart Is calm, though wretched; hopeless, yet resign'd. While to the winds and waves its sorrows given, May reach?though lost on earth?the ear of Heaven!
1788
Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex1
Press'd by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines,
But o'er the shrinking land sublimely rides.
5 The wild blast, rising from the Western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed; Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore 10 Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doom'd?by life's long storm opprest, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.
1789
On Being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic
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.
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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
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