tealing,
Speak of purer and holier feeling
Than man in his pilgrimage here below,
In the bondage of sin, can ever know.

I heard in my slumbers the ceaseless roar
Of the sparkling waves, as they met the shore,
Till lulled by the surge of the moon-lit deep,
By the heaving ocean I sank to sleep.
And a magic spell on my spirit was cast,
And forms that had perished in ages past,
Were by Fancy revealed to my wondering view,
As the veil of Oblivion she backward drew,
And showed me a glorious vision, dressed
In the rosy light of the glowing west.
Such colours at parting the day-god throws,
To gild his path, as rejoicing he goes,
Like a victor red with the spoils of fight,
To raise through darkness the banner of light!

Slowly and soothingly stole on my ear
Strains such as spirits in ecstasy hear,
When they tune their harps at the jasper throne
Of eternal light, with its rainbow zone;
And the harmony drawn from those living strings
Gushes forth from the fountain whence music springs;
But those songs divine, of heavenly birth,
Are seldom repeated to sons of earth.
Such sounds as I heard by that summer sea
Were never produced by man's minstrelsy;
Which rose and sank by the billowy motion
Of the breaking wave and the heaving ocean:
Now borne on the night-breeze was wafted high,
Through the glowing depths of the star-lit sky;
Now mournfully wailing, like plaintive dirge,
Rushed to the shore, with the rush of the surge.

And I saw a figure, all radiantly bright,
Float over the waves in the pale moonlight;
She moved to the notes of a magical song,
And the billows scarce murmured that bore her along;
The winds became mute--and the snowy wreath,
That crested the billows, looked dim beneath
Her silvery feet--that as lightly trod
The heaving deep, as the emerald sod.
A garland of coral her temples bound,
And her glittering robes floated lightly round,
Veiling her form in a shadowy shroud,
Like the mist that hangs on the morning cloud,
Ere the sun dispels, with his rising beam,
The vapours exhaled from the marshy stream.
The breeze wafted back from her forehead fair
Her long flowing tresses of shining hair,
Which cast on her features a lambent glow,
Like a halo encircling her brow of snow;
Revealing a face of such faultless mould
As that sea-born goddess possessed of old,
The morning she rose from the purple tide,
The queen of beauty and joy's fair bride--
But her cheek was as pale as the ocean spray
Ere it catc