“Sleep after Toil, Port after stormy Seas,
Ease after War, Death after Life, does greatly please.”
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book One
Amoretti III: The Sovereign Beauty
Sonnet
On being Cautioned against Walking on a Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It was Frequented by a Lunatic (1797)
by Charlotte Smith (1749 – 1806)
Is there a solitary wretch who hies
To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-utter’d lamentation, lies
Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.
Fourteen Lines 
Indite, not endite.
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