28
THE ARMADA.
The pride that is love and the love that is faith, a perfume
dissolved in flame,
Took fire from the dawn of the fierce July when fleets
were scattered as foam
And squadrons as flakes of spray; when galleon and
galliass that shadowed the sea
Were swept from her waves like shadows that pass with
the clouds they fell from, and she
Laughed loud to the wind as it gave to her keeping
the glories of Spain and Rome.
iii.
storms in their season thinned,
Since northward the war-ships of Spain came sheer up
the way of the south-west wind:
Where the citadel cliffs of England are flanked with
bastions of serpentine,
Far off to the windward loomed their hulls, an hundred
and twenty-nine,
