is out: the green
Straight belt of sea-weed now is seen,
That round the basement of the tower
Marks out the interspace of tide;
And watching men are heavy-eyed,
And sleepless lips are dry and sour.

The night is over like a dream:
The sea-birds cry and dip themselves;
And in the early sunlight, steam
The newly-bared and dripping shelves,
Around whose verge the glassy wave
With lisping wash is heard to lave;
While, on the white tower lifted high,
With yellow light in faded glass
The circling lenses flash and pass,
And sickly shine against the sky.

1869.

II

As the steady lenses circle
With a frosty gleam of glass;
And the clear bell chimes,
And the oil brims over the lip of the burner,
Quiet and still at his desk,
The lonely light-keeper
Holds his vigil.

Lured from afar,
The bewildered sea-gull beats
Dully against the lantern;
Yet he stirs not, lifts not his head
From the desk where he reads,
Lifts not his eyes to see
The chill blind circle of night
Watching him through the panes.
This is his country's guardian,
The outmost sentry of peace.
This is the man,
Who gives up all that is lovely in living
For the means to live.

Poetry cunningly gilds
The life of the Light-Keeper,
Held on high in the blackness
In the burning kernel of night.
The seaman sees and blesses him;
The Poet, deep in a sonnet,
Numbers his inky fingers
Fitly to praise him:
Only we behold him,
Sitting, patient and stolid,
Martyr to a salary.

1870.

ON A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES[44]

The necessity for marked characteristics in coast illumination increases
with the number of lights. The late Mr. Robert Stevenson, my
grandfather, contributed two distinctions, which he called respectively
the _intermittent_ and the _flashing_ light. It is only to the former of
these that I have to refer in the present paper. The intermittent light
was first introduced at Tarbetness in 1830, and is already in use at
eight stations on the coasts of the United Kingdom. As constructed
originally, it was an arrangement by which a fixed light was alternately
eclipsed and revealed. These recurrent occultations and revelations
produce an effect totally different from that of the revolving light,
which comes gradually into its full strength, and as gradually fades
away. The changes in the intermittent, on