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[First published 1852. Reprinted 1867.]
WHAT mortal, when he saw, | |
| Life’s voyage done, his heavenly Friend, | |
| Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly: | |
| ‘I have kept uninfring’d my nature’s law; | |
| The inly-written chart thou gavest me | 5 |
| To guide me, I have steer’d by to the end’? | |
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| Ah! let us make no claim | |
| On life’s incognizable sea | |
| To too exact a steering of our way! | |
| Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim | 10 |
| If some fair coast has lured us to make stay, | |
| Or some friend hail’d us to keep company! | |
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| Aye, we would each fain drive | |
| At random, and not steer by rule! | |
| Weakness! and worse, weakness bestow’d in vain! | 15 |
| Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive, | |
| We rush by coasts where we had lief remain; | |
| Man cannot, though he would, live chance’s fool. | |
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| No! as the foaming swathe | |
| Of torn-up water, on the main, | 20 |
| Falls heavily away with long-drawn roar | |
| On either side the black deep-furrow’d path | |
| Cut by an onward-labouring vessel’s prore, | |
| And never touches the ship-side again; | |
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| Even so we leave behind, | 25 |
| As, charter’d by some unknown Powers, | |
| We stem across the sea of life by night, | |
| The joys which were not for our use design’d, | |
| The friends to whom we had no natural right, | |
| The homes that were not destined to be ours. | 30 |
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