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

16.  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.

17.  The breakers were right beneath her bows,
      She drifted a dreary wreck,
    And a whooping billow swept the crew
      Like icicles from her deck.

18.  She struck where the white and fleecy waves
      Looked soft as carded wool,
    But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
      Like the horns of an angry bull.

19.  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!

20.  At day break, on the bleak seabeach,
      A fisherman stood aghast,
    To see the form of a maiden fair
      Lashed close to a drifting mast.

21.  The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
      The salt tears in her eyes;
    And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,
      On the billows fall and rise.

22.  Such was the wreck of the Hesperus
      In the midnight and the snow: 
    Heav’n save us all from a death like this
      On the reef of Norman’s Woe!

Definitions.—­l.  Skip’per, the master of a small merchant ves-sel. 3.  Veer’ing, changing.  Flaw, a sudden gust of wind. 4.  Port, harbor. 6.  Brine, the sea. 7.  A-main’, with sudden force. 8.  Weath’er, to endure, to resist. 9.  Spar, a long beam. 13.  Helm, the instrument by which a ship is steered. 18.  Card’ed, cleaned by combing. 19.  Shrouds, sets of ropes reaching from the mastheads to the sides of a vessel to support the masts.  Stove, broke in.

Notes.—­This piece is written in the style of the old English ballads.  The syllables marked (’) have a peculiar accent not usually allowed.

4.  The Spanish Main was the name formerly applied to the northern coast of South America from the Mosquito Territory to the Leeward Islands.

15.  The reef of Norman’s Woe.  A dangerous ledge of rocks on the Massachusetts coast, near Gloucester harbor.

19.  Went by the board.  A sailor’s expression, meaning “fell over the side of the vessel.”

LXX.  ANECDOTES OF BIRDS. (193)

1.  I had once a favorite black hen, “a great beauty,” as she was called by everyone, and so I thought her; her feathers were so jetty, and her topping so white and full!  She knew my voice as well as any dog, and used to run cackling and bustling to my hand to receive the fragments that I never failed to collect from the breakfast table for “Yarico,” as she was called.

2.  Yarico, by the time she was a year old, hatched a respectable family of chickens; little, cowering, timid things at first, but, in due time, they became fine chubby ones; and old Norah said, “If I could only keep Yarico out of the copse, it would do; but the copse is full of weasels and of foxes.