S

AT NIGHT

OMETIMES when Darkness

spread for me her robe

of rest,

And Silence guarded by, The Night-bird, Sleep, would

startle from her nest,

Stirred by the baby's cry.

When night is deepest now, again and

yet again

I lie with wide eyes wet:

It was his little cry which waked me

then:

His silence wakes me yet.

-Edmund Vance Cooke.

APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN

T

[From "Childe Harold"]

HERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none

intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its

roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature

more,

From these our interviews, in which I

steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee

in vain;

When, for a moment, like a drop of

rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling

groan,

Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined and unknown.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make

Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war; These are thy toys, and, as the snowy

flake,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which

mar

Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee

Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey

The stranger, slave or savage; their

decay

Has dried up realms to deserts:-not so

thou;

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed-in breeze or gale or

storm,

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;-boundless, endless and

sublime

The image of eternity-the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made: each zone

Obeys thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

-Lord Byron.