II.

    “Midnight, soft and fair above,
      Midnight, fierce and dark beneath,—­
    All on high the smile of love,
      All below the frown of death: 
    Waves that whirl in angry spite
    With a phosphorescent light
    Gleaming ghastly on the night,—­
      Like the pallid sneer of Doom,
    So malicious, cold, and white,
      Luring to this watery tomb,
    Where in fury and in fright
    Winds and waves together fight
      Hideously amid the gloom,—­
    As our cutter gladly sends,
      Dipping deep her sheeted boom
        Madly to the boiling sea,
    Lighted in these furious floods
    By that blaze of brilliant studs,
    Glistening down like glory-buds
        On the Race of Alderney!”

A few more words as to my Sarnian literaria.  Victor Hugo, when resident in Guernsey, had greatly offended my cousin (the chief of our clan) by stealing for his hired abode the title of our ancestral mansion, Haute Ville House:  and so, when I called on him, the equally offended Frenchman would not see me, though I was indulged with a sight of the bric-a-brac wherewith he had filled his residence, albeit deprived of access to its inmate.  Hugo was not popular among the sixties at that time.  Since then, Mr. Sullivan of Jersey published on his decease some splendid stanzas in French, which by request I versified in English:  so that our spirits are now manifestly en rapport.

I wrote also (as I am reminded) an ode on the consecration of St. Anne’s, Alderney, when I accompanied the Bishop to the ceremony:  and some memorable stanzas about the decent expediency of the Bailiff and Jurats being robed for official uniform, since ornamentally adopted; but before I wrote they wore mean and undistinguished “mufti.”

I had also much to do on behalf of my friend Durham, the sculptor, in the matter of his bronze statue to Prince Albert,—­advocating it both in prose and verse, and being instrumental in getting royal permission to take a duplicate of the great work now at South Kensington.  My cousin the Bailiff, the late Sir Stafford Carey, dated his knighthood from the inauguration of the statue, now one of the chief ornaments of St. Peter’s Port,—­the other being the Victoria Tower, also a Sarnian exploit.

Isle of Man.

Under such a title as this, “My Life as an Author,” that author being chiefly known for his poetry, though he has also written plenty of prose, it is (as I have indeed just said) not to be reasonably objected that the volume is spotted with small poems.  Still, I must do it, if I wish to illustrate by verse, or other extracts from my writings (published or unprinted), certain places where the said author has had his temporary habitat:  now one of these is the Isle of Man,—­where I and mine made a long summer stay at Castle Mona.  The chief literary productions of mine in that modern Trinacria, whose heraldic emblem, like that of ancient Sicily, is the Three legs of Three promontories, are some antiquarian pieces, principally one on the sepulchral mound of Orry the Dane:—­