Gathered from primal mist and firmament;
O surging shape of Life's unfathomed moan,
Whelming humanity with fears unmeant;
Yet do I love you, far above all fear,
And loving you unconquerably trust
The runes that from your ageless surfing start
Would read, were they revealed, gust upon gust,
That Immortality is might of heart!

SEA-MAD

(_A Breton Maid_)

Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me!
One said:
"Away! he is dead!
Upon my foam I have flung his head!
Go back to your cote, you never shall wed!--
(Nor he!)"

Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me.
Two brake.
The third with a quake
Cried loud, "O maid, I'll find for thy sake
His dead lost body: prepare his wake!"
(And back it plunged to the sea!)

Three waves of the sea came up on the wind to me.
One bore--
And swept on the shore--
His pale, pale face I shall kiss no more!
Ah, woe to women death passes o'er!
(Woe's me!)

THE ATHEIST

Over a scurf of rocks the tide
Wanders inward far and wide,
Lifting the sea-weed's sloven hair,
Filling the pools and foaming there,
Sighing, sighing everywhere.

Merged are the marshes, merged the sands,
Save the dunes with pine-tree hands
Stretching upward toward the sky,
Where the sun, their god, moves high:
Would I too had a god--yea, I!

For, the sea is to me but sea,
And the sky but infinity.
Tides and times are but some chance
Born of a primal atom-dance.
All is a mesh of Circumstance.

In it there is no Heart--no Soul--
No illimitable Goal--
Only wild happenings, by wont
Made into laws no might can shunt
From the deep grooves in which they hunt.

Wings of the gull I watch or claws
Of the cold crab whose strangeness awes:
Faces of men that feel the force
Of a hid thing they call life's course:
It is their hoping or remorse.

Yet it may be that I have missed
Something that only they who tryst,
Not with the sequence of events
But with their viewless Immanence,
Find and acclaim with spirit-sense.

AT THE HELM

(_Nova Scotia_)

Fog, and a wind that blows the sea
Blindly into my eyes.
And I know not if my soul shall be
When the day dies.

But if it be not and I lose
All that men live to