Substantial life to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;

Part of my soul, I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half.' With that thy gentle hand
Seized mine; I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace

And wisdom, which alone is truly fair."

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,

With one fair Spirit for my minister,

That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye elements!-in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted - Can ye not
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,
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;
Man marks the earth with ruin - his control
Stops with the shore; - upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage save his own,

When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths,- thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,- thou dost arise

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,

Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray

And howling to his Gods, where haply lies

His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.

--

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 wasted them 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.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

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,
For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane as I do here.

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.

MUCH 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:
Forgive me, if from present things I turn
To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,
And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.
Nature, they say, doth dote,

And cannot make a man

Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast

Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,

Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.

How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,

Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clear-grained human worth,
And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

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,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.

Nothing of Europe here,

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