THE SEA. R The Ocean. OLL 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. Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they? Thy waters washed them power 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. Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Dark heaving;-boundless, endless, and sublime. Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime And laid my hand upon thy mane, as I do here. -Lord Byron (Childe Harold). O Address to the Ocean. THOU vast Ocean' ever-sounding sea! Thou thing that windest round the solid world Fleets come and go, and shapes that have no life Or motion, yet are moved and meet in strife. The earth has naught of this: no chance or change Dies in his stormy manhood; and the skies Is beautiful, and when thy silver waves Make music in earth's dark and winding caves, I love to wander on thy pebbled beach, -Bryan W. Procter (Barry Cornwall). THE Grandeur of the Ocean. 'HE most fearful and impressive exhibitions of power known to our globe, belong to the ocean. The volcano, with its ascending flame and falling torrents of fire, and the earthquake, whose footstep is on the ruin of cities, are circumscribed in the desolating range of their visitations. But the ocean, when it once rouses itself in its coainless strength, shakes a thousand shores with its storm and thunder. Navies of oak and iron are tossed in mockery from its crest, and armaments, manned by the strength and courage of millions, perish among its bubbles. D The Coral Grove. EEP in the wave is a coral grove, Where the purple mullet and gold fish rove; Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue, That never are wet with falling dew, But in bright and changeful beauty shine Far down in the green and grassy brine. The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift, And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow: From coral rocks the sea-plants lift Their boughs, where the tides and billows flow; For the winds and the waves are absent there, To blush like a banner bathed in slaughter: Is sporting amid those bowers of stone, And when the ship from his fury flies, |