There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
   There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: 
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
   From these our interviews, in which I steal
   From all I may be, or have been before,
   To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

CLXXIX.

   Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—­roll! 
   Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
   Man marks the earth with ruin—­his control
   Stops with the shore;—­upon the watery plain
   The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
   A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
   When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
   He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

CLXXX.

   His steps are not upon thy paths,—­thy fields
   Are not a spoil for him,—­thou dost arise
   And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
   For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,
   Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
   And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray
   And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
   His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:  —­there let him lay.

CLXXXI.

   The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
   Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
   And monarchs tremble in their capitals. 
   The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
   Their clay creator the vain title take
   Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
   These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
   They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

CLXXXII.

   Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee —
   Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? 
   Thy waters wasted them while they were free
   And many a tyrant since:  their shores obey
   The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
   Has dried up realms to deserts:  not so thou,
   Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play —
   Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow —
Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

CLXXXIII.

   Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
   Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
   Calm or convulsed—­in breeze, or gale, or storm,
   Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
   Dark-heaving;—­boundless, endless, and sublime —
   The image of Eternity—­the throne
   Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
   The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.