Yet, potent Sea! 
  How placidly thy moist lips speak e’en now
  Along yon sparkling shingles.  Who can be
  So fanciless as to feel no gratitude
  That power and grandeur can be so serene,
  Soothing the home-bound navy’s peaceful way. 
  And rocking e’en the fisher’s little bark
  As gently as a mother rocks her child?—­

The inhabitants of other worlds behold
Our orb more lucid for thy spacious share
On earth’s rotundity; and is he not
A blind worm in the dust, great Deep, the man
Who sees not, or who seeing has no joy,
In thy magnificence?  What though thou art
Unconscious and material, thou canst reach
The inmost immaterial mind’s recess,
And with thy tints and motion stir its chords
To music, like the light on Memnon’s lyre!

  The Spirit of the Universe in thee
  Is visible; thou hast in thee the life—­
  The eternal, graceful, and majestic life—­
  Of nature, and the natural human heart
  Is therefore bound to thee with holy love.

  Earth has her gorgeous towns; the earth-circling sea
  Has spires and mansions more amusive still—­
  Men’s volant homes that measure liquid space
  On wheel or wing.  The chariot of the land,
  With pain’d and panting steeds, and clouds of dust,
  Has no sight-gladdening motion like these fair
  Careerers with the foam beneath their bows,
  Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day,
  Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night,
  Moor’d as they cast the shadows of their masts
  In long array, or hither flit and yond
  Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights,
  Like spirits on the darkness of the deep.

  There is a magnet-like attraction in
  These waters to the imaginative power,
  That links the viewless with the visible,
  And pictures things unseen.  To realms beyond
  Yon highway of the world my fancy flies,
  When by her tall and triple mast we know
  Some noble voyager that has to woo
  The trade-winds, and to stem the ecliptic surge. 
  The coral groves—­the shores of conch and pearl,
  Where she will cast her anchor, and reflect
  Her cabin-window lights on warmer waves,
  And under planets brighter than our own: 
  The nights of palmy isles, that she will see
  Lit boundless by the fire fly—­all the smells
  Of tropic fruits that will regale her—­all
  The pomp of nature, and the inspiriting
  Varieties of life she has to greet,
  Come swarming o’er the meditative mind.

  True, to the dream of Fancy, Ocean has
  His darker hints; but where’s the element
  That chequers not its usefulness to man
  With casual terror?  Scathes not earth sometimes
  Her children with Tartarean fires, or shakes
  Their shrieking cities, and, with one last clang
  Or hells for their own ruin, strews them