Flame-pikes; Two ‘fire-pikes,’ it is stated, were burned as a signal just before the flag-ship sank.  Three hundred and thirty-three was the estimate of the number drowned.

THE RETURN OF LAW

1660

At last the long darkness of anarchy lifts, and the dawn o’er the gray In rosy pulsation floods; the tremulous amber of day:  In the golden umbrage of spring-tide, the dewy delight of the sward, The liquid voices awake, the new morn with music reward.  Peace in her car goes up; a rainbow curves for her road; Law and fair Order before her, the reinless coursers of God;—­ Round her the gracious maids in circling majesty shine; They are rich in blossoms and blessings, the Hours, the white, the divine!

Hands in sisterly hands they unite, eye calling on eye;
Smiles more speaking than words, as the pageant sweeps o’er the sky. 
Plenty is with them, and Commerce; all gifts of all lands from her horn
Raining on England profuse; and, clad in the beams of the morn,
Her warrior-guardian of old the red standard rears in its might;
And the Love-star trembles above, and passes, light into light.

Many the marvels of earth, the more marvellous wonders on high,
Worlds past number on worlds, blank lightless abysses of sky;
But thou art the wonder of wonders, O Man!  Thy impalpable soul,
Atom of consciousness, measuring the Infinite, grasping the whole: 
Then, on the trivialest transiencies fix’d, or plucking for fruit
Dead-sea apples and ashes of sin, more brute than the brute. 
Yet in thy deepest depths, filth-wallowing orgies of night,
Lust remorseless of blood, yet, allow’d an inlet for light: 
As where, a thousand fathom beneath us, midnight afar
Glooms in some gulph, and we gaze, and, behold! one flash of one star! 
For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit is free
For the human to mix with divine; from himself to the Highest to flee. 
Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:—­and the song that we hear
Has been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp’d music is clear:—­
For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still breathes the light
air
Of the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied repair,
Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know not the doom
In the Marah valley of life laid up for the sons of the womb. 
—­I speak not of grovelling hearts, souls blind and begrimed from the
birth,
But the spirits of nobler strain, the elect of the children of earth:—­
For the needle swerves from the pole; they cannot do what they would;
In their truest aim is falsehood, and ill out-balancing good. 
Faith’s first felicities fade; the world-mists thicken and roll,
’Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o’er-hazing the eye of the soul. 
Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise
The phantasmal figures of passion; earth’s mirage