ess Love; and Sorrow there
Is but a memory to hallow Joy,
With chastened Happiness so deep and rare,
Well-nigh the Heart aches with its rich content,
And Hope with full fruition evermore is blent.

Constant Penelope, her web complete,
Rests there content at last and smiling down
On worn Ulysses basking at her feet;
Calm Beatrice wears joyously the crown
Bestowed by exiled Dante in his grief,
And Laura, kind, gives Petrarch's tuneful heart relief.

'Mid bloomy meadows laved by limpid streams,
Repose the Muses and the Graces sweet;
There kiss we lips we only kissed in dreams
Meshed in the grosser world; and there we meet
The fair and flower-like lost loves of our Youth,
When unafraid we trod the ways with radiant Truth.

Those who return have pressed alone the coast;
But tell of some lost in that charmed strond:
Aspiring souls who loving Honor most,
Have sought the crystal mountain-tops beyond,
And striven upward, heedless of their scars,
To where all paths lead ever to the shining stars.

THE VOICE OF THE SEA

Thus spake to Man the thousand-throated Sea;
Words which the stealing winds caught from its lips:

Thou thinkest thee and thine, God's topmost crown.
But hearken unto me and humbly learn
How infinite thine insignificance.
Thou boastest of thine age--thy works--thyself:
Thine oldest monuments of which thou prat'st
Were built but yesterday when measured by
Yon snow-domed mountains of eternal rock:
The Earth, thy mother, from whose breast thou draw'st,
The sweat-stained living which she wills to give,
And in whose dust thine own must melt again,
Was aged cycles ere thine earliest dawn;--
But they to me are young: I gave them birth.
Climb up those heaven-tipt peaks thy dizziest height,
Thou there shalt read, graved deep, my name and age;
Dig down thy deepest depth, shalt read them still.
Before the mountains sprang, before the Earth,
Thy cradle and thy tomb, was made, I was:
God called them forth from me, as thee from Earth.
Thou burrow'st through a mountain, here and there,
Work'st all thine engines, cutting off a speck;
I wash their rock-foundations under; tear
Turret from turret, toppling thundering down,
And crush their mightiest fragments into sand:
Thou gravest with thy records slab and spar,
And callest them memorials of thy Might;--
Lo! not a stone exists, from yon black cliff
To