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And come again, and vanish: the young Spring
Looks ever bright with leaves and blossoming;
And Winter always winds his sullen horn,
When the wild Autumn, with a look forlorn,
Dies in his strong manhood; and the skies
Weep, and flowers sicken, when the Summer flies.
Thou only, terrible Ocean, hast a power,

A will, a voice, and in thy wrathful hour,
When thou dost lift thine anger to the clouds,

A fearful and magnificent beauty shrouds

Thy broad green forehead. If thy waves be driven
Backwards and forwards by the shifting wind,

How quickly dost thou thy great strength unbind,
And stretch thine arms, and war at once with Heaven.

Thou trackless and immeasurable Main!

On thee no record ever lived again

To meet the hand that writ it: line nor lead
Hath ever fathomed thy profoundest deeps,
Where haply the huge monster swells and sleeps,
King of his watery limit, who, 't is said,
Can move the mighty ocean into storm
O, wonderful thou art, great element,
And fearful in thy spleeny humors bent,
And lovely in repose; thy summer form
Is beautiful, and when thy silver waves
Make music in earth's dark and winding caves,
I love to wander on thy pebbled beach,
Marking the sunlight at the evening hour,

And hearken to the thoughts thy waters teach-
Eternity, Eternity, and Power."

66

LESSON XXX.

The Song of the Sea-Shell. MRS. ABDY.

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I COME from the ocean - a billow passed o'er me,
And covered with sea-weeds, and glittering foam,
*I fell on the sands- and a stranger soon bore me
To deck the gay halls of the far distant home;
Encompassed by exquisite myrtles and roses,
Still, still in the deep I am pining to be;
And the low voice within me my feeling discloses,
And evermore murmurs the sounds of the sea.

The sky-lark at morn pours a choral of pleasure;
At eve, the sad nightingale warbles her note;
The harp in our halls nightly sounds a glad measure,
And beauty's sweet songs on the air lightly float;
Yet I sigh for the loud breaking billows that tossed me,
I long to the cool coral caverns to flee;

And when guests with officious intrusion accost me,
I answer them still in the strains of the sea.

Since I left the blue deep I am ever regretting;

And mingled with men in the regions above,

I have known them, the ties they once cherished forgetting, Oft trust to new friendship, and cling to new love.

O, is it so hard to preserve true devotion ?

Let mortals who doubt seek a lesson from me;

I am bound by mysterious links to the ocean,

And no language is mine but the sounds of the sea.

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THESE are the gardens of the desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name
The prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight,
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,

As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,

Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,

And motionless forever. · Motionless?·

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No- they are all unchained again.

The clouds

Sweep over with their shadows, and, beneath,
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the south!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high,

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Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not ― ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines

Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Sonora glide
Into the calm Pacific-have ye fanned
A nobler or a lovelier scene than this?

Man hath no part in all this glorious work :

The hand that built the firmament hath heaved

And smoothed these verdant swells, and sown their slopes

With herbage, planted them with island groves,

And hedged them round with forests. Fitting floor

For this magnificent temple of the sky

With flowers whose glory and whose multitude

Rival the constellations! The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love,-
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer blue,

Than that which bends above the eastern hills.

As o'er the verdant waste I glide my steed,
Among the high, rank grass that sweeps his sides,
The hollow beating of his footstep seems

A sacrilegious sound. I think of those

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Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here
The dead of other days? - and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds
That overlook the rivers, or that rise

In the dim forest, crowded with old oaks,
Answer. A race that long has passed away
Built them ;- a disciplined and populous race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms

Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock

The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvests; here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his manéd shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes,

From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came
The roaming hunter-tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mould-builders vanished from the earth.
The solitude of centuries untold

Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground

Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone

All

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save the piles of earth that hold their bones The platforms where they worshipped unknown godsThe barriers which they builded from the soil To keep the foe at bay till o'er the walls

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The wild beleaguerers broke, and, one by one,

The strongholds of the plain were forced and heaped
With corpses.
The brown vultures of the wood

Flocked to those vast, uncovered sepulchres,

And sat, unscared and silent, at their feast.
Haply some solitary fugitive,

Lurking in marsh and forest, till the sense
Of desolation and of fear became

Bitterer than death, yielded himself to die.
Man's better nature triumphed. Kindly words
Welcomed and soothed him; the rude conquerors
Seated the captive with their chiefs; he chose
A bride among their maidens, and at length
Seemed to forget-yet ne'er forgot the wife
Of his first love, and her sweet little ones,
Butchered, amid their shrieks, with all his race.

Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of GOD
Fills them, or is withdrawn. The red man, too
Has left the blooming wilds he ranged so long,
And, nearer to the Rocky Mountains, sought
A wider hunting-ground. The beaver builds
No longer by these streams, but far away,
On waters whose blue surface ne'er gave back
The white man's face among Missouri's springs,
And pools whose issues swell the Oregon,

He rears his little Venice.
The bison feeds no more.

In these plains

Twice twenty leagues

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