From “The Course of Time,” Book I.
GREAT Ocean! strongest of creation’s sons,
Unconquerable, unreposed, untired,
That rolled the wild, profound, eternal bass
In nature’s anthem, and made music such
As pleased the ear of God! original,
Unmarred, unfaded work of Deity!
And unburlesqued by mortal’s puny skill;
From age to age enduring...
-
-
The Sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth’s wide regions round;
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,... -
O Thou vast Ocean! ever-sounding Sea!
Thou symbol of a drear immensity!
Thou thing that windest round the solid world
Like a huge animal, which, downward hurled
From the black clouds, lies weltering and alone,
Lashing and writhing till its strength be gone!
Thy voice is like the thunder, and thy sleep
Is as a giant’s slumber, loud and... -
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he ’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And... -
What hid’st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?
Thou hollow-sounding and mysterious main!—
Pale glistening pearls and rainbow-colored shells,
Bright things which gleam unrecked of and in vain!—
Keep, keep thy riches, melancholy sea!
We ask not such from thee.Yet more, the depths have more!—what wealth untold,
Far down,... -
The Sea crashed over the grim gray rocks,
It thundered beneath the height,
It swept by reef and sandy dune,
It glittered beneath the harvest moon,
That bathed it in yellow light.Shell, and sea-weed, and sparkling stone,
It flung on the golden sand.
Strange relics torn from its deepest caves,
Sad trophies of wild... -
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep, square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses... -
A Weary weed, tossed to and fro,
Drearily drenched in the ocean brine,
Soaring high and sinking low,
Lashed along without will of mine;
Sport of the spume of the surging sea;
Flung on the foam, afar and anear,
Mark my manifold mystery,—
Growth and grace in their place appear.I bear round berries, gray and red,...
-
When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the equinox,
Landward in his wrath he scourges
The toiling surges,
Laden with sea-weed from the rocks:From Bermuda’s reefs; from edges
Of sunken ledges,
In some far-off, bright Azore;
From Bahama, and the dashing,
Silver flashing
... -
Toil on! toil on! ye ephemeral train,
Who build in the tossing and treacherous main;
Toil on! for the wisdom of man ye mock,
With your sand-based structure and domes of rock,
Your columns the fathomless fountains’ cave,
And your arches spring up to the crested wave;
Ye ’re a puny race thus to boldly rear
A fabric so vast in a realm so...