Shall instantly from me such chastisement
Receive, as shall the menaced peril far
TOIL ON! toil on! ye ephemeral train,
Who build in the tossing and treacherous main;
Toil on-for the wisdom of man ye mock,
With your sand-based structures and domes of rock;
Your columns the fathomless fountains lave,
your arches spring up to the crested wave; Ye're a puny race, thus boldly to rear
A fabric so vast in a realm so drear.
Ye bind the deep with your secret zone,
The ocean is sealed, and the surge a stone;
Fresh wreaths from the coral pavement spring,
Like the terraced pride of Assyria's king:
The turf looks green where the breakers rolled;
O'er the whirlpool ripens the rind of gold;
The sea-snatched isle is the home of men,
And mountains exult where the wave hath been.
But why do you plant near the billows dark
The wrecking reef for the gallant bark?
There are snares enough on the tented field,
'Mid the blossomed sweets that the valleys yield;
There are serpents to coil, ere the flowers are up;
There's a poison-drop in man's purest cup;
There are foes that watch for his cradle-breath-
And why need ye sow the floods with death?
Ye build-ye build—but ye enter not in,
Like the tribes whom the desert devoured in their sin.
From the land of promise ye fade and die,
Ere its verdure gleams forth on your weary eye;
As the kings of the cloud-crowned pyramid
Their noteless bones in oblivion hid,
Ye slumber unmarked 'mid the desolate main,
While the wonder and pride of your works remain.
MRS SIGOURNEY.
HERE, on a stony eminence, that stood,
Girt with inferior ridges, at the point,
Where light and darkness meet in spectral gloom,
Midway between the height and depth of ocean,
I marked a whirlpool in perpetual play,
As though the mountain were itself alive,
And catching prey on every side, with feelers
Countless as sunbeams, slight as gossamer:
Ere long transfigured, each fine film became
An independent creature, self-employed,
Yet but an agent in one common work,
The sum of all their individual labours.
Shapeless they seemed, but endless shapes assumed;
Elongated like worms, they writhed and shrunk
Their tortuous bodies to grotesque dimensions;
Compressed like wedges, radiated like stars,
Branching like seaweed, whirled in dazzling rings;
Subtle and variable as flickering flames,
Sight could not trace their evanescent changes,
Nor comprehend their motions, till minute
And curious observations caught the clue
To this live labyrinth,—where every one,
By instinct taught, performed its little task;
-To build its dwelling, and its sepulchre,
From its own essence exquisitely modelled;
There breed, and die, and leave a progeny,
Still multiplied beyond the reach of numbers,
To frame new cells and tombs; then breed and
die
As all their ancestors had done, and rest,
Hermetically sealed, each in its shrine,
A statue in this temple of oblivion!
Millions of millions thus, from age to age,
With simplest skill, and toil unweariable,
No moment and no movement unimproved,
Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread,
To swell the heightening, brightening, gradual
mound,
By marvellous structure climbing towards the
Each wrought alone, but all together wrought,
Unconscious, not unworthy, instruments,
By which a Hand invisible was rearing
A new creation in the secret deep.
Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by
Hence what Omnipotence alone could do
DEEP in the wave is a coral grove,
Where the purple mullet and gold-fish rove,
Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue,
That never are wet with falling dew,
But in bright and changeful beauty shine,
Far down in the green and glassy brine.
The floor is of sand like the mountain drift,
And the pearl shells spangle the flinty snow;
From coral rocks the sea-plants lift
Their boughs where the tides and billows flow; The water is calm and still below,
For the winds and waves are absent there,
And the sands are bright as the stars that glow In the motionless field of upper air:
There, with its waving blade of green,
The sea-flag streams through the silent water, And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen
To blush like a banner bathed in slaughter: There with a light and easy motion
The fan-coral sweeps through the clear, deep sea;
And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean
Are bending like corn on the upland lea;
And life, in rare and beautiful forms,
Is sporting amid those bowers of stone,
And is safe, when the wrathful spirit of storms,
Has made the top of the wave his own:
And when the ship from his fury flies,
Where the myriad voices of ocean roar,
When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies,
And demons are waiting the wreck on shore ;-
Then far below, in the peaceful sea,
The purple mullet and gold-fish rove, Where the waters murmur tranquilly
Through the bending twigs of the Coral Grove. JAMES PERCIVAL, an American Poet.
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