From Bermuda's reefs; from edges

Of sunken ledges,

In some far-off, bright Azore ;
From Bahama, and the dashing,
Silver-flashing

Surges of San Salvador;

From the tumbling surf that buries

The Orkneyan skerries, Answering the hoarse Hebrides;

And from wrecks of ships, and drifting Spars, uplifting

On the desolate, rainy seas;

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting

Currents of the restless main ;

Till in sheltered coves, and reaches

Of sandy beaches,

All have found repose again.

So when storms of wild emotion
Strike the occan

Of the poet's soul, erelong,

From each cave and rocky fastness

In its vastness,

Floats some fragment of a song:

From the far-off isles enchanted
Heaven has planted

With the golden fruit of Truth;
From the flashing surf, whose vision
Gleams Elysian

In the tropic clime of Youth;

From the strong Will, and the Endeavor
That forever

Wrestles with the tides of Fate;
From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered,
Tempest-shattered,

Floating waste and desolate ;

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless heart;
Till at length in books recorded,

They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

GULF-WEED.

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,
Rootless and rover though I be;
My spangled leaves, when nicely spread,
Arboresce as a trunkless tree;
Corals curious coat me o'er,

White and hard in apt array;
Mid the wild waves' rude uproar
Gracefully grow I, night and day.

Hearts there are on the sounding shore,
Something whispers soft to me,
Restless and roaming forevermore,

Like this weary weed of the sea;

Bear they yet on each beating breast
The eternal type of the wondrous whole,
Growth unfolding amidst unrest,
Grace informing with silent soul.

CORNELIUS GEORGE FENNER.

SEA LIFE.

FROM "THE PELICAN ISLAND."

LIGHT as a flake of foam upon the wind
Keel-upward from the deep emerged a shell,
Shaped like the moon ere half her horn is filled:
Fraught with young life, it righted as it rose,
And moved at will along the yielding water.
The native pilot of this little bark
Put out a tier of oars on either side,
Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,
And mounted up and glided down the billow
In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air,
And wander in the luxury of light.
Worth all the dead creation, in that hour,
To me appeared this lonely Nautilus,
My fellow-being, like myself, alive.
Entranced in contemplation, vague yet sweet,
I watched its vagrant course and rippling wake,
Till I forgot the sun amidst the heavens.

It closed, sunk, dwindled to a point, then nothing;

A shoal of dolphins tumbling in wild glee, Glowed with such orient tints, they might have been

The rainbow's offspring, when it met the ocean
In that resplendent vision I had seen.
While yet in ecstasy, I hung o'er these,
With every motion pouring out fresh beauties,
As though the conscious colors came and went
At pleasure, glorying in their subtle changes,
Enormous o'er the flood, Leviathan
Looked forth, and from his roaring nostrils sent
Two fountains to the sky, then plunged amain
In headlong pastime through the closing gulf.
These were but preludes to the revelry
That reigned at sunset: then the deep let loose
Its blithe adventurers to sport at large,
As kindly instinct taught them; buoyant shells,
On stormless voyages, in fleets or single,
Wherried their tiny mariners; aloof,
On wing-like fins, in bow-and-arrow figures,
The flying-fishes darted to and fro;
While spouting whales projected watery columns,
That turned to arches at their height, and seemed
The skeletons of crystal palaces

Built on the blue expanse, then perishing,
Frail as the element which they were made of:
Dolphins, in gambols, lent the lucid brine
Hues richer than the canopy of eve,
That overhung the scene with gorgeous clouds,
Decaying into gloom more beautiful
Than the sun's golden liveries which they lost :
Till light that hides, and darkness that reveals
The stars, exchanging guard, like sentinels
Of day and night, - transformed the face of

Fresh wreaths from the coral pavement spring,
Like the terraced pride of Assyria's king;
The turf looks green where the breakers rolled;
O'er the whirlpool ripens the rind of gold;
The sea-snatched isle is the home of men,
And mountains exult where the wave hath been.

But why do ye plant, 'neath the billows dark,
The wrecking reef for the gallant bark?
There are snares enough on the tented field,
Mid the blossomed sweets that the valleys yield;
There are serpents to coil ere the flowers are up,
There's a poison drop in man's purest cup,
There are foes that watch for his cradle breath,
And why need ye sow the floods with death?

With mouldering bones the deeps are white,
From the ice-clad pole to the tropics bright;
The mermaid hath twisted her fingers cold
With the mesh of the sea-boy's curls of gold,
And the gods of the ocean have frowned to see
The mariner's bed in their halls of glee;
Hath earth no graves, that ye thus must spread
The boundless sea for the thronging dead?

66

FROM THE PELICAN ISLAND."

EVERY one, By instinct taught, performed its little task, To build its dwelling and its sepulchre, From its own essence exquisitely modelled; There breed, and die, and leave a progeny, Still multiplied beyond the reach of numbers, To frame new cells and tombs, then breed and die As all their ancestors had done, — and rest, Hermetically sealed, each in its shrine, A statue in this temple of oblivion! Millions of millions thus, from age to age, With simplest skill and toil unweariable, No moment and no movement unimproved, Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread, To swell the heightening, brightening, gradual mound,

By marvellous structure climbing towards the day,

A point at first It peered above those waves; a point so small I just perceived it, fixed where all was floating; And when a bubble crossed it, the blue film Expanded like a sky above the speck;

Left by one tide and cancelled by the next; Egypt's dread wonders, still defying Time, Where cities have been crumbled into sand, Scattered by winds beyond the Libyan desert, Or melted down into the mud of Nile,

It spread, accumulated, and erelong
Presented to my view a dazzling plain,
White as the moon amid the sapphire sea;
Bare at low water, and as still as death,

But when the tide came gurgling o'er the surface
'T was like a resurrection of the dead:
From graves innumerable, punctures fine
In the close coral, capillary swarms
Covered the bald-pate reef;

Erelong the reef o'ertopt the spring-flood's height,
And mocked the billows when they leapt upon it,
Unable to maintain their slippery hold,
And falling down in foam-wreaths round its verge.
Steep were the flanks, with precipices sharp,
Descending to their base in ocean gloom.
Chasms few and narrow and irregular
Formed harbors, safe at once and perilous, -
Safe for defence, but perilous to enter.
A sea-lake shone amidst the fossil isle,
Reflecting in a ring its cliffs and caverns,
With heaven itself seen like a lake below.

Compared with this amazing edifice,
Raised by the weakest creatures in existence,
What are the works of intellectual man?
Towers, temples, palaces, and sepulchres ;
Ideal images in sculptured forms,

Thoughts hewn in columns, or in domes expanded,
Fancies through every maze of beauty shown;
Pride, gratitude, affection turned to marble,
In honor of the living or the dead;
What are they?— fine-wrought miniatures of art,
Too exquisite to bear the weight of dew,
Which every morn lets fall in pearls upon them,
Till all their pomp sinks down in mouldering relics,
Yet in their ruin lovelier than their prime !
Dust in the balance, atoms in the gale,
Compared with these achievements in the deep,
Were all the monuments of olden time,
In days when there were giants on the earth.
Babel's stupendous folly, though it aimed
To scale heaven's battlements, was but a toy,
The plaything of the world in infancy;
The ramparts, towers, and gates of Babylon,
Built for eternity, though, where they stood,
Ruin itself stands still for lack of work,
And Desolation keeps unbroken Sabbath;
Great Babylon, in its full moon of empire,
Even when its "head of gold" was smitten off
And from a monarch changed into a brute
Great Babylon was like a wreath of sand,

Where Memphis flourished, and the Pharaohs reigned;

Egypt's gray piles of hieroglyphic grandeur,
That have survived the language which they speak,
Preserving its deed emblems to the eye,
Yet hiding from the mind what these reveal; -
Her pyramids would be mere pinnacles,
Her giant statues, wrought from rocks of granite
But puny ornaments for such a pile
As this stupendous mound of catacombs,
Filled with dry mummies of the builder-worms.

JAMES MONTGOMERY.

THE CORAL GROVE.

DEEP in the wave is a coral grove,
Where the purple mullet and gold-fish rove;
Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue
That never are wet with falling dew,
But in bright and changeful beauty shine
Far down in the green and glassy brine.
The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift,
And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow;
From coral rocks the sea-plants lift
Their boughs, where the tides and billows flow;
The water is calm and still below,
For the winds and waves are absent there,
And the sands are bright as the stars that glow
In the motionless fields of upper air.
There, with its waving blade of green,
The sea-flag streams through the silent water,
And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen
To blush, like a banner bathed in slaughter.
There, with a light and easy motion,
The fan-coral sweeps through the clear, deep sea;
And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean
Are bending like corn on the upland lea.
And life, in rare and beautiful forms,
Is sporting amid those bowers of stone,
And is safe when the wrathful spirit of storms
Has made the top of the wave his own.
And when the ship from his fury flies,
Where the myriad voices of ocean roar,
When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies,
And demons are waiting the wreck on shore,
Then, far below, in the peaceful sea,
The purple mullet and gold-fish rove,
Where the waters murmur tranquilly,
Through the bending twigs of the coral grove.
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL