Above example, pity, praise, or blame.
To sow and reap a boundless field of Fame.
Ask aid no more from Nations that forget
Your championship-old Europe's mighty debt.
Though Poland (Lazarus-like) has burst the
gloom,
She rises not a beggar from the tomb.
In Fortune's frown, on Danger's dizziest brink,
Despair and Poland's name must never link.
All ills have bounds-plague, whirlwind, fire, and
flood:
Ev'n Power can spill but bounded sums of blood.
States caring not what Freedom's price may be
May late or soon, but must at last, be free;
For body-killing tyrants cannot kill
The public soul-the hereditary will,
That, downward as from sire to son it goes,
By shifting bosoms more intensely glows:
Its heir-loom is the heart, and slaughter'd men
Fight fiercer in their orphans o'er again.
Poland recasts-though rich in heroes old,-
Fler men in more and more heroic mould:
Her eagle ensign best among mankind
Becomes, and types her eagle-strength of mind:
Her praise upon my faultering lips expires:-
Resume it, younger bards, and nobler lyres!
HAIL to thy face and odours, glorious Sea! "Twere thanklessness in me to bless thee not, Great beauteous Being! in whose breath and smile
My heart beats calmer, and my very mind
Inhales salubrious thoughts. How welcomer
Thy murmurs than the murmurs of the world!
Though like the world thou fluctuatest, thy din
To me is peace, thy restlessness repose.
Ev'n gladly I exchange yon spring-green lanes
With all the darling field-flowers in their prime,
And gardens haunted by the nightingale's
Long trills and gushing ecstacies of song,
For these wild headlands and the sea-mew's clang.
With thee beneath my windows, pleasant Sea!
I long not to o'erlook Earth's fairest glades
And green savannahs: Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine.
The eagle's vision cannot take it in:
The lightning's wing, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it like a wearied bird.
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.
Of rural landscape are there lights and shades
Of more harmonious dance and play than thine.
How vividly this moment brightens forth,
Between grey parallel and leaden breadths,
A belt of hues that stripes thee many a league,
Flush'd like the rainbow, or the ring-dove's neck
And giving to the glancing sea-bird's wing
The semblance of a meteor.
Cameleon-like thou changest, but there's love
In all thy change, and constant sympathy
With yonder Sky-thy Mistress; from her brow
Thou takest thy moods, and wear'st her co-
lours on
Thy faithful bosom; morning's milky white,
Noon's sapphire, or the saffron glow of eve,
And all thy balmier hours, fair Element!
Have such divine complexion-crisped smiles,
Luxuriant heavings, and sweet whisperings,—
That little is the wonder, Love's own Queen
From thee of old was fabled to have sprung-
Creation's common! which no human power
Can parcel or enclose; the lordliest floods
And cataracts, that the tiny hands of man
Can tame, conduct, or bound, are drops of dew
To thee, that couldst subdue the Earth itself,
And brook'st commandment from the heavens
alone
For marshalling thy waves.
Yet, potent Sea!
How placidly thy moist lips speak ev'n now
Along you sparkling shingles! Who can be
So faciless, as to feel no gratitude
That power and grandeur can be so serene,
So thing the home-bound navy's peaceful way,
And rocking ev'n the fisher's little bark
As gently as a mother rocks her child?
The inhabitants of other worlds behold
Our orb more lucid for thy spacious share
On earth's rotundity; and is he not
A blind worm in the dust, great Deep!--the man
Who sees not, or who seeing. has no joy
In the magnificence? What though thou art
Unconscious and material, thon canst reach
The inmost immaterial mi id's recess,
And with thy tints and motion stir its chords
To music, like the light on Memnon's lyre!
The Spirit of the Universe in thee
Is visible; thou hast in thee the life-
The eternal, graceful, and majestic life-
Of Nature, and the natural human heart
Is therefore bound to thee with holy love.
Earth has her gorgeous towns; the earth-circling
Sa
Has spires and mansions more amusive still-
Men's volant homes, that measure liquid space
On wheel or wing. The chariot of the land,
With pain'd and panting steeds and clouds of
dust,
Has no sight gladdening motion like these fair Careerers with the foam beneath their bows, Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day,
Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the
Moor'd as they cast the shadows of their masts
In long array, or hither flit and yond
Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights,
Like spirits on the darkness of the deep.
There is a magnet-like attraction in
These waters to the imaginative power,
That links the viewless with the visible,
And pictures things unseen. To realms beyond
Yon highway of the world my fancy flies,
When by her tall and triple mast we know
Some noble voyager that has to woo
Trade-winds, and to stem the ecliptic surge.
The coral groves-the shores of conch and pearl,
Where she will cast her anchor, and reflect
Her cabin-window lights on warmer waves,
And under planets brighter than our own:
The nights of palmy isles. that she will see
Lit boundless by the fire-fly-all the smells
Of tropic fruits that will regale her-all
The pomp of nature, and the inspiriting
Varieties of life she has to greet,-
Come swarming o'er the meditative mind.
True to the dream of Fancy, Ocean has
His darker hints; but where's the element
That chequers not its usefulness to man
With casual terror? Scathes not Earth some-
Her children with Tartarean fires, or slakes
Their shrieking cities, and, with one last clang
Of bells for their own ruin, strews them flat
As riddled ashes-silent as the grave?
Walks not Contagion on the air itself?
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