Or gaily ramble for th’ allotted hours;
Sailors and lasses from the town attend,
The servant-lover, the apprentice-friend;
With all the idle social tribes who seek
And find their humble pleasures once a week. 
   Turn to the watery world!—­but who to thee
(A wonder yet unview’d) shall paint—­the Sea? 
Various and vast, sublime in all its forms,
When lull’d by zephyrs, or when roused by storms,
Its colours changing, when from clouds and sun
Shades after shades upon the surface run;
Embrown’d and horrid now, and now serene,
In limpid blue, and evanescent green;
And oft the foggy banks on ocean lie,
Lift the fair sail, and cheat th’ experienced eye. 
   Be it the summer—­noon:  a sandy space
The ebbing tide has left upon its place;
Then just the hot and stony beach above,
Light twinkling streams in bright confusion move;
(For heated thus, the warmer air ascends,
And with the cooler in its fall contends)
Then the broad bosom of the ocean keeps
An equal motion; swelling as it sleeps,
Then slowly sinking; curling to the strand,
Faint, lazy waves o’ercreep the rigid sand,
Or tap the tarry boat with gentle blow,
And back return in silence, smooth and slow. 
Ships in the calm seem anchor’d; for they glide
On the still sea, urged solely by the tide: 
Art thou not present, this calm scene before,
Where all beside is pebbly length of shore,
And far as eye can reach, it can discern no more? 
   Yet sometimes comes a ruffing cloud to make
The quiet surface of the ocean shake;
As an awaken’d giant with a frown
Might show his wrath, and then to sleep sink down. 
   View now the Winter-storm! above, one cloud,
Black and unbroken, all the skies o’ershroud: 
Th’ unwieldy porpoise through the day before
Had roll’d in view of boding men on shore;
And sometimes hid and sometimes show’d his form,
Dark as the cloud, and furious as the storm. 
   All where the eye delights, yet dreads to roam,
The breaking billows cast the flying foam
Upon the billows rising—­all the deep
Is restless change; the waves so swell’d and steep,
Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells,
Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells: 
But nearer land you may the billows trace,
As if contending in their watery chase;
May watch the mightiest till the shoal they reach,
Then break and hurry to their utmost stretch;
Curl’d as they come, they strike with furious force,
And then re-flowing, take their grating course,
Raking the rounded flints, which ages past
Roll’d by their rage, and shall to ages last. 
   Far off the Petrel in the troubled way
Swims with her brood, or flutters in the spray;
She rises often, often drops again,
And sports at ease on the tempestuous main. 
   High o’er the restless deep, above the reach
Of gunner’s hope, vast flights of Wild-ducks