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(Excerpt)
DAYS pass, winds veer, and favoring skies | |
| Change like the face of fortune; storms arise; | |
| Safely, but not within her port desired, | |
| The good ship lies. | |
| Where the long sandy Cape | 5 |
| Bends and embraces round, | |
| As with a lover’s arm, the sheltered sea, | |
| A haven she hath found | |
| From adverse gales and boisterous billows free. | |
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| Now strike your sails, | 10 |
| Ye toilworn mariners, and take your rest | |
| Long as the fierce northwest | |
| In that wild fit prevails, | |
| Tossing the waves uptorn with frantic sway. | |
| Keep ye within the bay, | 15 |
| Contented to delay | |
| Your course till the elemental madness cease, | |
| And heaven and ocean are again at peace. | |
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| How gladly there, | |
| Sick of the uncomfortable ocean, | 20 |
| The impatient passengers approach the shore; | |
| Escaping from the sense of endless motion, | |
| To feel firm earth beneath their feet once more, | |
| To breathe again the air | |
| With taint of bilge and cordage undefiled, | 25 |
| And drink of living springs, if there they may, | |
| And with fresh fruits and wholesome food repair | |
| Their spirits, weary of the watery way. | |
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| And oh! how beautiful | |
| The things of earth appear | 30 |
| To eyes that far and near | |
| For many a week have seen | |
| Only the circle of the restless sea! | |
| With what a fresh delight | |
| They gaze again on fields and forests green, | 35 |
| Hovel, or whatsoe’er | |
| May bear the trace of man’s industrious hand; | |
| How grateful to their sight | |
| The shore of shelving sand, | |
| As the light boat moves joyfully to land! | 40 |
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| Woods they beheld, and huts, and piles of wood, | |
| And many a trace of toil, | |
| But not green fields or pastures. ’T was a land | |
| Of pines and sand; | |
| Dark pines, that from the loose and sparkling soil | 45 |
| Rose in their strength aspiring: far and wide | |
| They sent their searching roots on every side, | |
| And thus, by depth and long extension, found | |
| Firm hold and grasp within that treacherous ground: | |
| So had they risen and flourished; till the earth, | 50 |
| Unstable as its neighboring ocean there, | |
| Like an unnatural mother, heaped around | |
| Their trunks its wavy furrows white and high; | |
| And stifled thus the living things it bore. | |
| Half buried thus they stand, | 55 |
| Their summits sere and dry, | |
| Marking, like monuments, the funeral mound; | |
| As when the masts of some tall vessel show | |
| Where, on the fatal shoals, the wreck lies whelmed below. * * * * * | |
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