perhaps in furtive swiftness and silence, perhaps The 

 with a confused multitudinous noise among Tides, 

 which are inchoate cries and fragmentary 

 bewildering echoes of muffled songs and 

 chants, perhaps as in charging hordes of wild 

 sea-horses where the riders are not seen in the 

 dazzle of spray nor their shouting heard in the 

 tumult of wave dashed against wave and 

 billow hurled on billow. 



To be in some such place . . . say, again, 

 where the Breton tide races against the flank 

 of Normandy and in a few minutes isolates 

 Mont St. Michel from the mainland ; or where 

 the Northumbrian flood pours across the 

 narrow sands of Lindisfarne ; or, more than 

 everywhere else I think, where the fierce 

 Atlantic tides leap with bewildering surge and 

 clamour across the vast sea-gates of Uist and 

 rush like a cataract into the Hebrid Sea . . . 

 to be in some such place and at the first 

 mysterious signals of the oncoming flood, by 

 night, is to meet the unforgettable, and, as 

 Blake says, to be at one with the eternal 

 mystery. 



Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is that 

 ancient inexplicable mystery, the everlasting 

 and unchanging rhythm which holds star to 

 star in infinite procession, which lifts and 

 lowers the poles of our sun -wheeling world, 



45 



