"An uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree, and some few stakes, Broken and unrepaired; and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon."
This is the sort of landscape, too, which, in another department of art, Collins delighted in representing. But Shelley's picture of the luxuriant rush and water-plant vegetation would have been magnificent. Listen how he handles a theme of the kind:
"And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath, Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth-- Prickly and pulpous, and blistering and blue, Livid and starred with a lurid dew; Spawn-weeds, and filth, and leporous scum, Made the running rivulet thick and dumb; And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes."
Tennyson is the living poet who would picture with equal effect the region of swamp, and rush, and pool. Brought up in a fen district, his eye and feeling for marsh scenery and vegetation are perfect. Remember the marish mosses in the rotting fosse which encircled the "Moated Grange." Musing thus of the Poet Laureate, I would assign to this landscape embodiment of King Death, I passed the half-way tower, where three _douaniers_, seated in chairs, were fishing and looking as glum and silent as their prey, and began to discern the gravelly, shingly land of vines and olives again before me. The clear air of the South cheats us northerns like a mirage. You see objects as near you as in England they would be brought by a very fair spy-glass, and the effect, before you began to make allowances for the atmospheric spectacles, is to put you dreadfully out of humour at the length of the way, before you actually came up with the too distinct goal. So was it strongly with me in pedestrianising towards Lunel. Lunel seemed retreating back and back, so that my consolation became that it would be surely stopped by the Cevennes, even if the worst came to the worst; and go where it would, I was determined to come up with it somehow. Entering the region of the vine, the moppy olive, and the dust which was flying about in clouds, I halted at a roadside auberge to wash the latter article out of my throat, and reaped my reward in the sight of a splendid cartoon suspended over the great fireplace, which represented, in a severe allegory, "The Death of Credit killed by bad Payers." The scene was a handsome street, with a great open _café_ behind, at the _comptoir_ of which sat Madam Commerce aghast at the atrocity being committed before her. In a corner are seen a group of _gardes de commerce_--in the vernacular, bailiffs--lamenting over their ruined occupation. I came to know the profession of these gentlemen, from the fact that their style and titles were legibly imprinted across their waistcoats. In the foreground, the main catastrophe of the composition was proceeding. Credit, represented by a fat, good-natured-looking, elderly gentleman in a blue greatcoat, was stretched supine upon the stones, while his three murderers brandished their weapons above him. The delineation of the culprits was anything but flattering to the three classes of society which I took them to represent. The "first murderer," as they say in _Macbeth_, was a soldier. His sabre was deep in poor Credit's side. The second criminal must have been a musician, for he has just hit Credit a superhuman blow on the head with a fiddle--not a very deadly weapon one would suppose; while the third assassin, armed with a billiard cue, seemed to typify the idler portion of the community in general. Between them, however, there could be no doubt that Credit had been fairly done to death--the grim intimation was there to stare all topers in the face.