For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,

""Tis a fog-bell, on a rock-bound coast!"

And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns, what may it be?"

O say,

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!"

But the father answered never a word,

A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face turned to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That saved she might be;

And she thought of Christ, who stilled the waves On the Lake of Galilee.

22

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted, a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her sides
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair

Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;

LULLABY

SWEET and low, sweet and low,

Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea!

Over the rolling waters go,

Come from the dying moon, and blow,

Blow him again to me;

While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;

Rest, rest, on mother's breast,

Father will come to thee soon;

Father will come to his babe in the nest,

Silver sails all out of the west

Under the silver moon:

Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.

Alfred Tennyson.

ANNAN WATER

ANNAN Water 's wading deep,

And my Love Annie's wondrous bonny; And I am loath she should wet her feet, Because I love her best of ony.

He's loupen on his bonny gray,

He rode the right gate and the ready;