e imperial nets
Of Spain at last. Onward the mountains came
With all their golden clouds of sail and flags
Like streaming cataracts; all their glorious chasms
And glittering steeps, echoing, re-echoing,
Calling, answering, as with the herald winds
That blow the golden trumpets of the morning
From Skiddaw to Helvellyn. In the midst
The great _San Martin_ surged with heaven-wide press
Of proudly billowing sail; and yet once more
Slowly, solemnly, like another dawn
Up to her mast-head soared in thunderous gold
The sacred standard of their last crusade;
While round a hundred prows that heaved thro' heaven
Like granite cliffs, their black wet shining flanks,
And swept like moving promontories, rolled
The splendid long-drawn thunders of the foam,
And flashed the untamed white lightnings of the sea
Back to a morn unhalyarded of man,
Back to the unleashed sun and blazoned clouds
And azure sky--the unfettered flag of God.

* * * *

Like one huge moving coast-line on they came
Crashing, and closed the ships of England round
With one fierce crescent of thunder and sweeping flame,
One crimson scythe of Death, whose long sweep drowned
The eternal ocean with its mighty sound,
From heaven to heaven, one roar, one glitter of doom,
While out to the sea-line's blue remotest bound
The ships of Drake still fled, and the red fume
Of battle thickened and shrouded shoal and sea with gloom.

The distant sea, the close white menacing shoals
Are shrouded! And the lion's brood fight on!
And now death's very midnight round them rolls;
Rent is the flag that late so proudly shone!
The red decks reel and their last hope seems gone!
Round them they still keep clear one ring of sea:
It narrows; but the lion's brood fight on,
Ungrappled still, still fearless and still free,
While the white menacing shoals creep slowly out to lee.

Now through the red rents of each fire-cleft cloud,
High o'er the British blood-greased decks flash out
Thousands of swarthy faces, crowd on crowd
Surging, with one tremendous hurricane shout
_On, to the grapple_! and still the grim redoubt
Of the oaken bulwarks rolls them back again,
As buffeted waves that shatter in the furious bout
When cannonading cliffs meet the full main
And hurl it ba