Now a black demon, belching fire and steam,

Drags thee away, a pale, dismantled dream,

And all thy desecrated hulk
Must landlocked lie, a helpless bulk,
To gather weeds in the regardless stream.

Woe 's me, from Ocean's sky-horizoned air
To this! Better, the flame-cross still aflare,
Shot-shattered to have met thy doom
Where thy last lightnings cheered the
gloom,

Than here be safe in dangerless despair. 30

Thy drooping symbol to the flagstaff clings,

Thy rudder soothes the tide to lazy rings,

decks, Ne'er trodden save by captive foes,

And wonted sternly to impose

God's will and thine on bowed imperial necks!

40

That sway this universe, of none withstood, Unconscious of man's outcries or applause, Or what man deems his evil or his good;

1 This poem is the last, so far as is known, written by Mr. Lowell. He laid it aside for revision, leaving two of the verses incomplete. In a pencilled fragment of the poem the first verse appears as follows:

Strong, simple, silent, such are Nature's Laws. In the final copy, from which the poem is now printed, the verse originally stood:

laws. Strong, steadfast, silent are the but 'steadfast' is crossed out, and 'simple' written above.

A similar change is made in the ninth verse of the stanza, where simpleness' is substituted for steadfastness.' The change from steadfast' to 'simple' was not made, probably through oversight, in the first verse of the second stanza. There is nothing to indicate what epithet Mr. Lowell would have chosen to complete the first verse of the third stanza. (Note by Professor C. E. Norton, in Last Poems of James Russell Lowell.)