University of Virginia Library

DELICIÆ MARIS.

Once, when I was a little child,
I sate beneath a tree
Beside a little running stream,
And a mariner sate with me,
And thus he spake: “For seventy years
I sailed upon the sea.
Thou thinkest that the earth is fair,
And full of strange delight;
Yon little brook that murmurs by
Is wondrous in thy sight;
Thou callest yon poor butterfly
A very marvellous thing,
And listenest in a fond amaze
If but a lark doth sing.
Thou speak'st as if God only made
Valley, and hill, and tree;
Yet I blame thee not, thou simple child,
Wise men have spoke like thee.
But far and free are the ocean fields;
On land you're trammeled round,
On the right and on the left likewise
Doth lie forbidden ground:
But the ocean fields are free to all
Where'er they list to go,
With the heavens above, and round about,
And the deep deep sea below.
It gladdeneth much my very soul
The smallest ship to see,
For I know where'er a sail is spread
God speaketh audibly.
Up to the North, the Polar North,
With the whalers did I go,
'Mid the mountains of eternal ice,
To the land of thawless snow.
The great ice-mountains walled us in,
The strength of man was vain,
But at once the Eternal showed his power,
The rocks were rent in twain.
The sea was parted for Israel,
The great Red Sea, of yore;
And Moses and the Hebrew race,
In joy, went dryshod o'er.
A miracle as great was wrought
For us in the Polar Main,
The rocks were rent from peak to base,
And our course was free again.
Yet amid those seas so wild and stern,
Where man hath left no trace,
The sense of God came down to us
As in a holy place.
Great kings have piled up pyramids,
Have built them temples grand,
But the sublimest temple far
Is in yon northern land:
Its pillars are of the adamant,
By a thousand winters hewed,
Its priests are the awful Silence
And the ancient Solitude.
And then we sailed to the Tropic Seas,
That are like crystal clear;
Thou little child, 't is marvellous
Of them alone to hear;
For down, down in those ocean depths,
Many thousand fathoms low,
I have seen, like woods of mighty oaks,
The trees of coral grow;
The red, the green, and the beautiful
Pale-branched like the chrysolite,
Which amid the sun-lit waters spread
Their flowers intensely bright:
Some they were like the lily of June,
Or the rose of Fairy-land,
As if some poet's wondrous dream
Inspired a sculptor's hand.
And then the million creatures bright,
That sporting went and came:
Heaven knows! but, I think, in Paradise
It must have been the same;
When 'neath the trees where angels walked
The land was free to all,
When the lion gamboled with the kid,
The great ones with the small.
No wastes of burning sand are there,
There is not heat nor cold,
And there doth spring the diamond mine,
There flow the veins of gold.
Oft with the divers of the East,
Who in these depths have been,
Have I conversed of marvels strange,
And treasures they have seen.
They say, each one, not halls of kings
With the ocean caves can vie,
With the untrod caves of the carbuncle,
Where the great sea-treasures lie.
And well I wot it must be so;
Man parteth evermore
The miser-treasures of the earth,
The sea has all its store.
I have crossed the Line full fifteen times,
And down in the Southern Sea
Have seen the whales, like bounding lambs,
Leap up; the strong, the free,
Leap up, the creatures that God hath made
To people the isleless main:
They have no bridle in their jaws,
And on their necks no rein.
But, my little child, thou sittest here
Still gazing on yon stream,
And the wondrous things that I have told
To thee are as a dream.
To me they are as living thoughts;
And well I understand
Why the sublimest sea is still
More glorious than the land:
For when at first the world awoke
From its primaeval sleep,
Not on the land the Spirit of God
Did move, but on the deep.