Stood peering shuddering in, hearing afar
    The painful sighs, which shook his savage breast. 
    The dwarfish elves, with waning lamps in hand,
    Creeping like worms along the slimy floor,
    Pursued the ebbing tide collecting spoils. 
    The lovers saw from what exhaustless mines
    Were gathered up the overwhelming wealth—­
    The jewels and the curious costly toys
    Which graced OENE and all her splendid court;
    For there the sea,—­forever wrecking treasures,
    Gulping down golden argosies at once—­
    Leaves them behind him in his angry flight.

    “Art thou afraid, my darling?” BERTHO asked—­
    “I’ll bear thee safely through this hideous place. 
    Here Lucifer, I think, must love to linger;
    The shrieking of the ocean hath a sound
    Like the united wail of hopeless souls;
    Here darkness dwells in everlasting sleep;
    For these poor, puny lights which wander round,
    Scarce make the drowsy lashes of his lids
    Tremble o’er his blind eyes;—­the heated earth
    Gives forth the odors of her burning heart,
    In whose incessant fires her vitals wither. 
    See! where those wretched gnomes are dragging chests,
    Banded with iron! most like, is heaped within
    The ingots of some drowned West-Indian: 
    And look! ah heaven! how beautiful and strange,
    To see the delicate corpse of this young girl
    Like marble petrified, the raven hair
    Grown rankly long, trailing around her limbs,
    And clinging to her lovely, breathless breast!—­
    That rude dwarf clutching from her helpless hands
    The jewels which some friend or lover gave. 
    If we had time to give our fancies range,
    What a wild story we would make of this!”
    Thrilling with pity, Olive hid her eyes.

    Twelve hours of desperate flight, and they emerged
    From darkness to a dead shore, shrouded white,—­
    Saw the green ocean rolling, saw the Sun,
    Pale, like a wounded God, and weary, hang
    Low in the southern sky—­saw mountains crowned
    With snow and fire—­saw motionless cataracts
    Hanging like frozen rainbows over chasms—­
    And icebergs settling downward towards the sun
    As if to pierce him with their glist’ning spears. 
    Remotely, to the North, the Polar Sea
    Hung like a roseate cloud along the sky
    Fringing with lovely tints the dim horizon,
    Holding unseen its island star within.

    “A miracle!” quoth BERTHO; “Love, observe
    How all these waves set from the shore, and glide
    Like a broad river, ’twixt these frozen banks. 
    The current which ran northward with thy boat,
    Has overtopped the Pole, and flows away,
    A liquid belt, girdling the earth.  Alas! 
    We have no trusty boat in which to launch,
    Once more, our fortunes on the promising deep.”