Well might the gazer deem, that when, Worn with the struggle and the strife, And heart-sick at the sons of men,

The good forsake the scenes of life,—

Like the deep quiet, that awhile

Lingers the lovely landscape o'er, Shall be the peace whose holy smile Welcomes them to a happier shore.

THE OCEAN.

BY WILLIAM P. PALMER.

"There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar."

I KNOW of nothing in the whole compass of Byron's varied productions which equals in sublimity of conception and vividness of coloring, his portraitures of the ocean. Though, for the most part, the bold and masterly touches of genius are displayed in every thing which came from his hand, yet when his imagination fixes upon the "dark blue sea," he appears to surpass all other poets. As you muse over his immortal sketches in the hush of midnight and by the waning lamp, the wild note of the seabird and the low murmur of whispering waters and their silvery light-or the death-shriek of the drowning mariner and the roar of billows, together with the lurid and appalling wave-flash of the reflected lightning, break in upon the silence and dimness of your chamber. Time and space are annihilated by the magic of his numbers, and you feel yourself snatched away to the far-off sea, and regaled by its fresh cool breezes as you go bounding over its glo

rious expanse. He was emphatically the poet of the ocean, for the proudest march of his genius was upon its "mountain waves." He appears to have possessed a delight in its wild scenes amounting almost to a passionate fondness. In his boyhood, seated on some retired crag, he hung over it hour after hour in the still summer evenings, and felt in the excitement of his glowing fancy a yearning towards it; and when in after years the ties which held him to his country were severed, he flew to its trackless solitudes as to a refuge and a home. Like a proud vessel which, after having been becalmed and ingloriously confined in some narrow bay, has gained the broad deep and the rushing gale, the indignant bard swept forth in the buoyancy of freedom, rejoicing as the breeze freshened, and exulting in the rudest commotion of the elements. At that stirring hour he could "laugh to flee away" even from the land of his fathers, for in the thrill of his emotions there was less of sadness than of joy. I can see him in imagination as he trode the deck, now soothing the sorrows of his little page, and now sweeping his deep-toned lyre as he poured his farewell to the receding shores, and a welcome to the waves that came dashing onward from the far stretch of the seaward horizon. The void in his heart, which no father's love and no mother's endearing tenderness had preoccupied with images of parental affection, and which had been widening from his boyhood by the death or estrangement of early associates, was now filled with the beauty and stirring majesty of VOL. II. 9

the great deep. The loneliness that brooded like a dark spirit over his melancholy bosom was dispelled for a season by the strange grandeur of the prospects around him; and in the romance of poetical enthusiasm, he regarded the ocean as a living and intelligent existence. As he bent over the prow in the gentle moonlight, he discoursed with it as with a friend, and in its billowy commotions he gazed upon it with mingled joy and reverence. And who has not experienced such sensations, even when far away from the ocean, while his thoughts were hovering over its azure domains? I remember what a novel and indescribable feeling used to steal upon me when a boy, whenever I fell in with Virgil's description of the sea. I had never been beyond the mountain boundaries of my native valley-never enjoyed even a remote prospect of the sublime object of his inspiration, and therefore my young fancy was introduced in those passages to a fairy world, and left free to expatiate amid the glorious imagery of the Mantuan bard. After reading of Palinurus or the sweet-voiced sirens, I have gazed at the little lake which lies embosomed in the green hills near my father's cottage till my eyes grew dim, and its rippling surface seemed to stretch away to a misty and limitless expanse, whilst the sweep of the winds among the rough crags and pine forests of the neighboring mountains uttered to my imagination the voice of the sounding deep. But how far short of reality, both in grandeur and beauty, did I find the conceptions of fancy when I

beheld the object itself some years after. My first view of it was on a clear but gusty afternoon of autumn. The winds had been abroad for many hours, and as I looked seaward from the high promontory and beheld the long rough surges rushing towards me, and listened to their wild roar as they were flung back from the caverned battlements at my feet, I felt as if the pillars of the universe were shaken around me, and stood awed and abased before the majesty of excited nature. Since then I have been on lofty precipices while the thundercloud was bursting below me-have leaned over the trembling brink of Niagara, and walked within its awful chambers, but the thrill of that moment has never returned. The feeling of awe, however, gradually gave place to an intense but pleasing emotion, and I longed to spring away from the tame and trodden earth, to that wild, mysterious world, whose strange scenes broke so magnificently upon my vision. No wonder that our first roving impulses are towards the ocean. No wonder that the romantic and adventurous spirit of youth deems lightly of hardship or peril when aroused by its stirring presentations. There is something so winning in the multiplied superstitions of its hardy wandererssomething so fascinating in its calm beauty, and so animating in its stormy recklessness, that the ties of country and kindred sit looser at our hearts as curiosity whispers of its unseen wonders. In after years, when the bloom of existence has lost much of its brightness, when curiosity has become ener