llow cave.
The vortex of the World spins raptureless,
And languorously crawls the oily wave.
From sun-shot peaks of dawn no more I leap
Like a launching condor past control,--
O speak, Son of the West! if this be Sleep--
Or Death that is our destiny and goal?
Thick torpor clouds the climes; eternal snow
Falling, falling, falling, throngs my realm.
Shall nevermore my breath o'er Ocean blow?
Nor wrestle with his seas that roar and whelm?
No balsam to the woods can I restore,
Nor render pure my breath for man to drain;
I faint within his nostrils that implore
My draught to rouse his drooping heart again.
My Earth that I enfolded like a bloom,
Lies but a withered creature,--sterile, cold,--
Hither, fly hither! O winds who share my doom,
Oh, wail your dying sire whose days are told.

A prone and expiring giant lifts up his bulk once more and
would not die.

It is Ocean, usurper of Earth's deepest vales, besieger of islands,
batterer of continents.

His great green front and land-fettered limbs glimmer up to his
mistress Moon. His breast heaves unto her as of old with an
awful and passionate longing.

But a film has veiled his eyes, and now stagnation builds up
her muddy pillars in his heart. There Death reigns amidst havoc.

His leviathans and huge worms and wrecks of ships rot on every
shore and in his dunnest deeps amidst pearls and sea-born blooms.

The innumerable myrmidons of his empire, fretted masses, chained
by weeds, oppress the old Equator.

The coasts he laved and swept are marred with deadly froth.
They are now but ruins of the vast poison-chalice of the sea,
all fringed with bloody spume.

This is his final anguish and these his final groans.

It is the last song of the sorrowing Sea!

Hoarsely reverberates his threnody; he piles up higher and
higher his tremendous tomb of sound, beneath which he shall
compose himself in tideless calms of sleep.

SONG OF THE SEA

Oh, I am old and hoar! so old that none
Of all my drops holds memory of birth:
My mists no longer rise to robe the Sun,
No longer lend great rivers to the Earth.
Low in my deeps my broken creatures die,--
They die! and their corruption loads my floors;
Countless and cold, my lordly monsters lie
On league-long sands of continental shores.
Where bide you, O white stallions of the waves?
And you torrential surges,--where the crest
You flung on leaping mountains that you d