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From “Childe Harold,” Canto IV.
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, | 5 |
| 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. | |
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| Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,—roll! | 10 |
| 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, | 15 |
| When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, | |
| He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, | |
| Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. | |
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| His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields | |
| Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| His petty hope in some near port or bay, | |
| And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay. | |
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| The armaments which thunderstrike the walls | |
| Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake | |
| And monarchs tremble in their capitals, | 30 |
| 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 | 35 |
| Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar. | |
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| 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 | 40 |
| 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 wrinkles on thine azure brow; | |
| Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now. | 45 |
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| 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, | 50 |
| 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. | |
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| And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy | 55 |
| Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be | |
| Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy | |
| I wantoned with thy breakers,—they to me | |
| Were a delight; and if the freshening sea | |
| Made them a terror, ’t was a pleasing fear; | 60 |
| For I was as it were a child of thee, | |
| And trusted to thy billows far and near, | |
| And laid my hand upon thy mane,—as I do here. |
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