This is love, who, deaf to prayers, Floods with blessings blessing unawares. Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime, The image of Eternity, the throne Of the Invisible! even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone His steps are not upon thy paths, thy fields Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, Are not a spoil for him, thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth's destruction thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray And howling, to his gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth :- there let him lay. The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee and arbiter of war, These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar. alone. [Written at Scarborough, in the Summer of 1805.] ALL hail to the ruins, the rocks, and the shores! But now the fair rivers of Paradise wind zone He stretches his hundred-fold arms, Despoiling, destroying its charms; Beneath his broad footstep the Ganges is dry, Thus the pestilent Upas, the demon of trees, And with livid contagion polluting the breeze, The birds on the wing, and the flowers in their Are slain by its venomous breath, Ah! why hath Jehovah, in forming the world, His ramparts of rocks round the continent hurled, Now brilliant with sunbeams and dimpled with And cradled the deep in his hand, oars, Now dark with the fresh-blowing gale, If man may transgress his eternal command, While soft o'er thy bosom the cloud-shadows sail, To ravage the uttermost earth, And violate nations and realms that should be There are, gloomy Ocean, a brotherless clan, Love, friendship, and conjugal bliss, Demands of the spoiler his share of the prey. Then joy to the tempest that whelms them be- And makes their destruction its sport; Where the vultures and vampires of Mammon Where Europe exultingly drains 1 |