Substantial life to have thee by my side Part of my soul, I seek thee, and thee claim THE OCEAN LORD BYRON Lord George Noel Gordon Byron was born in London, England, January 22, 1788, and died in Missolonghi, Greece, April 19, 1824. The following is an extract from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." 66 H! that the Desert were my dwelling-place, OF With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her! Accord me such a being? Do I err In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, I love not Man the less, but Nature more, What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean roll! His steps are not upon thy paths,- thy fields And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields His petty hope in some near port or bay, there let him lay. The armaments which thunderstrike the walls The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee not so thou, Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm, Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy I wanton'd with thy breakers they to me Were a delight; and if the freshening sea Made them a terror-'t was a pleasing fear, And trusted to thy billows far and near, ABRAHAM LINCOLN JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22, 1819, and died there Aug. 12, 1891. The following extract is from the "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration," July 21, 1865. NUCH was he, our Martyr-Chief, SUCH Whom late the Nation he had led, With ashes on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief: And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; But by his clear-grained human worth, They knew that outward grace is dust; They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface And thwart her genial will; Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. I praise him not; it were too late; And some innative weakness there must be |