f all our blithe and strange and strenuous day.

For when the northering road faced westward--when
The dark sharp sudden gorge dropped seaward--then,
Beneath the stars, between the steeps, the track
We followed, lighted not of moon or sun,
And plunging whither none
Might guess, while heaven and earth were hoar and black,
Seemed even the dim still pass whence none turns back:
And through the twilight leftward of the way,
And down the dark, with many a laugh and leap,
The light blithe hill-streams shone from scaur to steep
In glittering pride of play;
And ever while the night grew great and deep
We felt but saw not what the hills would keep
Sacred awhile from sense of moon or star;
And full and far
Beneath us, sweet and strange as heaven may be,
The sea.

The very sea: no mountain-moulded lake
Whose fluctuant shapeliness is fain to take
Shape from the steadfast shore that rules it round,
And only from the storms a casual sound:
The sea, that harbours in her heart sublime
The supreme heart of music deep as time,
And in her spirit strong
The spirit of all imaginable song.

Not a whisper or lisp from the waters: the skies were not silenter.
Peace
Was between them; a passionless rapture of respite as soft as
release.
Not a sound, but a sense that possessed and pervaded with patient
delight
The soul and the body, clothed round with the comfort of limitless
night.
Night infinite, living, adorable, loved of the land and the sea:
Night, mother of mercies, who saith to the spirits in prison, Be
free.
And softer than dewfall, and kindlier than starlight, and keener
than wine,
Came round us the fragrance of waters, the life of the breath of
the brine.
We saw not, we heard not, the face or the voice of the waters: we
knew
By the darkling delight of the wind as the sense of the sea in it
grew,
By the pulse of the darkness about us enkindled and quickened, that
here,
Unseen and unheard of us, surely the goal we had faith in was near.
A silence diviner than music, a darkness diviner than light,
Fulfilled as from heaven with a measureless comfort the measure of
night.

But never a roof for shelter