North press thee hard!
From their large victorious eyes
They darted burning shafts.
With crooked, polished words,
They threatened to cleave my breast.
With sharp-pointed missives they shattered
My poor, stunned brain.
In vain I held up against them my shield,
The arrows whizzed, the strokes cracked,
And from the fair barbarians of the North
I was pressed even unto the sea.
And now with deep, free breath, I hail the sea,
The dear, redeeming sea--
Thalatta! Thalatta!

II. TEMPEST.

Gloomy lowers the tempest over the sea,
And through the black wall of cloud
Is unsheathed the jagged lightning,
Swift outflashing, and swift-vanishing,
Like a jest from the brain of Chronos.
Over the barren, billowy water,
Far away rolls the thunder,
And up leap the white water-steeds,
Which Boreas himself begot
Out of the graceful mare of Erichthon,
And the sea-birds flutter around,
Like the shadowy dead on the Styx,
Whom Charon repels from his nocturnal boat.

Poor, merry, little vessel,
Dancing yonder the most wretched of dances!
Eolus sends it his liveliest comrades,
Who wildly play to the jolliest measures;
One pipes his horn, another blows,
A third scrapes his growling bass-viol.
And the uncertain sailor stands at the rudder,
And constantly gazes at the compass,
The trembling soul of the ship;
And he raises his hands in supplication to Heaven--
"Oh, save me, Castor, gigantic hero!
And thou conquering wrestler, Pollux."

III. WRECKED.

Hope and love! everything shattered
And I myself, like a corpse
That the growling sea has cast up,
I lie on the strand,
On the barren cold strand.
Before me surges the waste of waters,
Behind me lies naught but grief and misery;
And above me, march the clouds,--
The formless, gray daughters of the air,
Who from the sea, in buckets of mist,
Draw the water,
And laboriously drag and drag it,
And spill it