take my song's wild honey,
And give me back thy sunny
Wide eyes that weary never,
And wings that search the sea;
Ah, well were I for ever,
Wouldst thou change lives with me.

[Sidenote: PARSON DARBY]

The old lighthouse on Beachy Head, the Belle Tout, which first flung its
beams abroad in 1831, has just been superseded by the new lighthouse
built on the shore under the cliff. Near the new lighthouse is Parson
Darby's Hole--a cavern in the cliff said to have been hewed out by the
Rev. Jonathan Darby of East Dean as a refuge from the tongue of Mrs.
Darby. Another account credits the parson with the wish to provide a
sanctuary for shipwrecked sailors, whom he guided thither on stormy
nights by torches. In a recent Sussex story by Mr. Horace Hutchinson,
called _A Friend of Nelson_, we find the cave in the hands of a powerful
smuggler, mysterious and accomplished as Lavengro, some years after
Darby's death.

[Sidenote: UNDER BEACHY HEAD]

A pleasant walk from Eastbourne is to Birling Gap, a great smuggling
centre in the old days, where the Downs dip for a moment to the level of
the sea. Here at low tide one may walk under the cliffs. Richard
Jefferies, in the essay from which I have already quoted, has a
beautiful passage of reflections beneath the great bluff:--"The sea
seems higher than the spot where I stand, its surface on a higher
level--raised like a green mound--as if it could burst in and occupy the
space up to the foot of the cliff in a moment. It will not do so, I
know; but there is an infinite possibility about the sea; it may do what
it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered, it may
overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency
unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and
understood--something still to be discovered--a mystery.

"So the white spray rushes along the low broken wall of rocks, the sun
gleams on the flying fragments of the wave, again it sinks, and the
rhythmic motion holds the mind, as an invisible force holds back the
tide. A faith of expectancy, a sense that something may drift up from
the unknown, a large belief in the unseen resources of the endless space
out yonder, soothes the mind with dreamy hope.

"The little rules and little experiences, all the petty ways of narrow
life, are shut off behind by the ponderous and impassable cliff; as if
we had dwelt in the dim light of a cave, but coming