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POEMS OF THE SEA.

They

turned to the Earth, but she frowns

on her child;

They turned to the Sea, and he smiled as of old : Sweeten was the peril of the breakers white and wild, Sweeter than the land, with its bondage and gold!

CHILD
MEMORIAL
LIBRARY

Bayard Taylorry

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It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,
Or like a cradled creature lies.
I'm on the sea, I 'm on the sea,

I am where I would ever be,

With the blue above and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.

If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

I love, O, how I love to ride

On the fierce, foaming, bursting tide,
Where every mad wave drowns the moon,
And whistles aloft its tempest tune,
And tells how goeth the world below,
And why the southwest wind doth blow!
I never was on the dull, tame shore
But I loved the great sea more and more,
And backward flew to her billowy breast,
Like a bird that seeketh her mother's nest,
And a mother she was and is to me,
For I was born on the open sea.

The waves were white, and red the morn,
In the noisy hour when I was born;
The whale it whistled, the porpoise rolled,
And the dolphins bared their backs of gold;
And never was heard such an outery wild,
As welcomed to life the ocean child.

I have lived since then, in calm and strife,
Full fifty summers a rover's life,

With wealth to spend, and a power to range,
But never have sought or sighed for change:
And death, whenever he comes to me,
Shall come on the wide, unbounded sea!

BARRY CORNWALL.

A HYMN OF THE SEA.

THE sea is mighty, but a mightier sways His restless billows. Thou, whose hands have scooped

His boundless gulfs and built his shore, thy breath,

That moved in the beginning o'er his face,
Moves o'er it evermore. The obedient waves
To its strong motion roll, and rise and fall.
Still from that realm of rain thy cloud goes up,
As at the first, to water the great earth,
And keep her valleys green. A hundred realms
Watch its broad shadow warping on the wind,
And in the dropping shower with gladness hear
Thy promise of the harvest. I look forth
Over the boundless blue, where joyously
The bright crests of innumerable waves
Glance to the sun at once, as when the hands
Of a great multitude are upward flung

In acclamation. I behold the ships
Gliding from cape to cape, from isle to isle,
Or stemming toward far lands, or hastening
home

From the Old World. It is thy friendly breeze
That bears them, with the riches of the land,
And treasure of dear lives, till, in the port,
The shouting seaman climbs and furls the sail.

But who shall bide thy tempest, who shall face

The blast that wakes the fury of the sea?
O God! thy justice makes the world turn pale,
When on the arméd fleet, that royally
Bears down the surges, carrying war, to smite
Some city or invade some thoughtless realm,
Descends the fierce tornado. The vast hulks
Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the

sails

Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts
Are snapped asunder; downward from the decks
Downward are slung, into the fathomless gulf,
Their cruel engines; and their hosts, arrayed
In trappings of the battle-field, are whelmed
By whirlpools or dashed dead upon the rocks.
Then stand the nations still with awe, and
pause

A moment from the bloody work of war.

These restless surges eat away the shores Of earth's old continents; the fertile plain Welters in shallows, headlands crumble down, And the tide drifts the sea-sand in the streets Of the drowned city. Thou, meanwhile, afar In the green chambers of the middle sea, Where broadest spread the waters and the line Sinks deepest, while no eye beholds thy work, Creator! thou dost teach the coral worm To lay his mighty reefs. From age to age, He builds beneath the waters, till, at last, His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check The long wave rolling from the southern pole To break upon Japan. Thou bid'st the fires, That smoulder under ocean, heave on high The new-made mountains, and uplift their peaks, A place of refuge for the storm-driven bird. The birds and wafting billows plant the rifts With herb and tree; sweet fountains gush; sweet airs

Ripple the living lakes that, fringed with flow

ers,

Are gathered in the hollows. Thou dost look
On thy creation and pronounce it good.
Its valleys, glorious with their summer green,
Praise thee in silent beauty; and its woods
Swept by the murmuring winds of ocean, join
The murmuring shores in a perpetual hymn.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

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Now dark with the fresh-blowing gale,

O gardens of Eden! in vain
Placed far on the fathomless main,

Where Nature with Innocence dwelt in her youth,
When pure was her heart and unbroken her truth

But now the fair rivers of Paradise wind
Through countries and kingdoms o'erthrown;
Where the giant of tyranny crushes mankind,
Where he reigns, and will soon reign alone;
For wide and more wide, o'er the sunbeaming zone
He stretches his hundred-fold arms,
Despoiling, destroying its charms;
Beneath his broad footstep the Ganges is dry,
And the mountains recoil from the flash of his eye.

Thus the pestilent Upas, the demon of trees,
Its boughs o'er the wilderness spreads,
And with livid contagion polluting the breeze,
Its mildewing influence sheds ;

The birds on the wing, and the flowers in their beds,
Are slain by its venomous breath,

That darkens the noonday with death,
And pale ghosts of travellers wander around,
While their mouldering skeletons whiten the
ground.

Ah! why hath Jehovah, in forming the world, With the waters divided the land,

His ramparts of rocks round the continent hurled,
And cradled the deep in his hand,

If man may transgress his eternal command,
And leap o'er the bounds of his birth,
To ravage the uttermost earth,

And violate nations and realms that should be
Distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea?

While soft o'er thy bosom the cloud-shadows sail, There are, gloomy Ocean, a brotherless clan,

And the silver-winged sea-fowl on high,

Like meteors bespangle the sky,

Or dive in the gulf, or triumphantly ride,
Like foam on the surges, the swans of the tide.

From the tumult and smoke of the city set free,
With eager and awful delight,

From the crest of the mountain I gaze upon thee,
I gaze, and am changed at the sight;
For mine eye is illumined, my genius takes flight,
My soul, like the sun, with a glance
Embraces the boundless expanse,

And moves on thy waters, wherever they roll, From the day-darting zone to the night-shadowed pole.

My spirit descends where the day-spring is born, Where the billows are rubies on fire,

Who traverse thy banishing waves,
The poor disinherited outcasts of man,
Whom Avarice coins into slaves.

From the homes of their kindred, their fore. fathers' graves,

Love, friendship, and conjugal bliss,
They are dragged on the hoary abyss;
The shark hears their shrieks, and, ascending to
day,

Demands of the spoiler his share of the prey.

Then joy to the tempest that whelms them beneath,
And makes their destruction its sport;
But woe to the winds that propitiously breathe,
And waft them in safety to port,

Where the vultures and vampires of Mammon resort;

Where Europe exultingly drains

And the breezes that rock the light cradle of morn The life-blood from Africa's veins ;

Are sweet as the Phoenix's pyre.

O regions of beauty, of love and desire!

Where man rules o'er man with a merciless rod, And spurns at his footstool the image of God !

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