18 SEPTEMBER 1886, Page 14

POETRY.

MORTE POINT.

A NIGHT of roaring, wild, tempestuous winds, And blinding mist, and cruel sweeping surge, Deadening the light, drowning the fog-horn's dirge, While on the Rock the doomed keel hopeless grinds.

The next night, calm and still beneath the moon, Passing in pity through a haze of tears, Like beauty sorrowing over snapped careers, And the wife's sobs and sweetheart's deathly swoon, There stretches out like some huge skeleton, White in the moon as dead men's bleaching bones, A hideous skull, grinning at murder done, The Rock, made up of thousand devilish stones, Spite of its beauty well named Morte ; for ah ! Beauty but veils that false white Golgotha.

Horace, near Ilfracombe, September 13th.