But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the suns palace-porch, where when unyoked His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.1
Poor shell! that Wordsworth so pounded and flattened in his marsh it no longer had the hoarseness of a sea, but of a hospital.Walter Savage Landor: Letter to John Forster. [back]