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 Bayard Taylorry It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies, I am where I would ever be, With the blue above and the blue below, If a storm should come and awake the deep, I love, O, how I love to ride On the fierce, foaming, bursting tide, The waves were white, and red the morn, I have lived since then, in calm and strife, With wealth to spend, and a power to range, 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, In acclamation. I behold the ships From the Old World. It is thy friendly breeze But who shall bide thy tempest, who shall face The blast that wakes the fury of the sea? sails Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts 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 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. Now dark with the fresh-blowing gale, O gardens of Eden! in vain Where Nature with Innocence dwelt in her youth, But now the fair rivers of Paradise wind Thus the pestilent Upas, the demon of trees, The birds on the wing, and the flowers in their beds, That darkens the noonday with death, Ah! why hath Jehovah, in forming the world, With the waters divided the land, His ramparts of rocks round the continent hurled, If man may transgress his eternal command, And violate nations and realms that should be 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, From the tumult and smoke of the city set free, From the crest of the mountain I gaze upon thee, 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, From the homes of their kindred, their fore. fathers' graves, Love, friendship, and conjugal bliss, Demands of the spoiler his share of the prey. Then joy to the tempest that whelms them beneath, 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 ! |