Beautiful! Sir, you may say so. Thar isn’t her match in the county,—
Is thar, old gal? Chiquita, my darling, my beauty!
Feel of that neck, sir,—thar ’s velvet! Whoa! Steady—ah, will you? you vixen!
Whoa! I say. Jack, trot her out; let the gentleman look at her paces.
Morgan!—She ain’t nothin’ else, and I ’ve got the papers to prove it.
Sired by...
BEHOLD the Sea,
The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July:
Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my...
Beautiful, sublime, and glorious;
Mild, majestic, foaming, free,—
Over time itself victorious,
Image of eternity!
Sun and moon and stars shine o’er thee,
See thy surface ebb and flow,
Yet attempt not to explore thee
In thy soundless depths below.
Whether morning’s splendors steep thee
With the rainbow’s...
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...
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,...
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
...
A Wet sheet and a flowing sea,—
A wind that follows fast,
And fills the white and rustling sail,
And bends the gallant mast,—
And bends the gallant mast, my boys,
While, like the eagle free,
Away the good ship flies, and leaves
Old England on the lee.
O for a soft and gentle wind!
I heard a fair one cry;...
