eart,--
Then pause and linger yet ere thou depart.

Linger, I ask no more,--
Thou art enough for ever--thou alone;
What future can restore,
When thou art flown,
All that I hold from thee and call my own?

VERSE: HOMEWARD BOUND

I have seen a fiercer tempest,
Known a louder whirlwind blow;
I was wrecked off red Algiers,
Six-and-thirty years ago.
Young I was, and yet old seamen
Were not strong or calm as I;
While life held such treasures for me,
I felt sure I could not die.

Life I struggled for--and saved it;
Life alone--and nothing more;
Bruised, half dead, alone and helpless,
I was cast upon the shore.
I feared the pitiless rocks of Ocean;
So the great sea rose--and then
Cast me from her friendly bosom,
On the pitiless hearts of men.

Gaunt and dreary ran the mountains,
With black gorges, up the land;
Up to where the lonely Desert
Spreads her burning, dreary sand:
In the gorges of the mountains,
On the plain beside the sea,
Dwelt my stern and cruel masters,
The black Moors of Barbary.

Ten long years I toiled among them,
Hopeless--as I used to say;
Now I know Hope burnt within me
Fiercer, stronger, day by day:
Those dim years of toil and sorrow
Like one long dark dream appear;
One long day of weary waiting--
Then each day was like a year.

How I cursed the land--my prison;
How I cursed the serpent sea--
And the Demon Fate that showered
All her curses upon me;
I was mad, I think--God pardon
Words so terrible and wild--
This voyage would have been my last one,
For I left a wife and child.

Never did one tender vision
Fade away before my sight,
Never once through all my slavery,
Burning day or dreary night;
In my soul it lived, and kept me,
Now I feel, from black despair,
And my heart was not quite broken,
While they lived and blest me there.

When at night my task was over,
I would hasten to the shore;
(All was strange and foreign inland,
Nothing I had known before;)
Strange looked the bleak mountain passes,
Strange the red glare and black shade,
And the Oleanders, waving
To the sound the fountains made.

Then I gazed at the great Ocean,
Till she grew a friend again;
And because she knew old England,
I forgave her all my pain:
So the blue still sky above me,
With its white clouds' fleecy fold,
And the glimmering stars, (though brighter,)
Looked like home and days of old.

And a calm would fall upon me,
Worn perhaps with work and pain,
The wild hungry longing left me