Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The harbour banks, all glittering gay,
Laughed in their turn no sad adieu
In parting from a fair Spring day
That laughingly withdrew.
Great brilliant clouds, piled round the sea
And hills, had left blue zenith free
For last lark earliest star to greet;
When, for the crowning vernal sweet,
Along my path I chanced to meet
The Pilot's pretty Daughter.

Round her gentle, happy face,
Dimple-soft and freshly fair,

Danced, with careless ocean-grace,
Locks of silk-brown hair;
Shading her cheeks or waved behind,
As lightly blew the veering wind,
Unbound, unbraided, and unlooped;
Or when to tie her shoe she stooped,
Below her chin the half-curls drooped,
And veiled the Pilot's Daughter.

Rising, she tossed them gaily back,
With gesture infantine and brief,
To fall around as soft a neck
As wilding-rose's leaf.
Her Sunday frock, of lilac shade
(That choicest tint), was neatly made,
And not too long to hide from view
The stout but no-way clumsy shoe,
And stocking's smoothly-fitting blue,
That graced the Pilot's Daughter.

With look half-timid and half-droll,
And then with slightly downcast eyes,
And blush that outward softly stole,
Unless it were the skies

Whose sunlight shifted on her cheek,
She half-turned when she heard me speak;
But 'twas a brightness all her own,
That in her firm light step was shown,
And the clear cadence of her tone;
The Pilot's lovely Daughter!

Were it my lot, there peeped a wish,
To hand a pilot's oar and sail,
Or haul the dripping moonlight mesh,
Spangled with herring-scale;
By dying stars, how sweet 'twould be,
And dawn-blow freshening the sea,
With weary, cheery pull to shore,
To gain my cottage home once more,
And meet, before I reached the door,
My darling Pilot's Daughter!

This element beside my feet
Looks like a tepid wine of gold;
One touch, one taste, dispels the cheat,
'Tis salt and bitter cold:
A fisher's hut, the scene perforce
Of narrow thoughts and manners coarse,

Coarse as the curtains that beseem
With net-festoons the smoky beam,
Would no-way lodge my favourite dream,
E'en with my Pilot's Daughter.

To the open riches of the earth,
Endowing men in their own spite,
The “Poor,” by privilege of birth,
Stand in the closest right:
But not alone the palm grows dull
With clayey delve and watery pull;
And Labour sends a sleepy class
To school, a childish school to Mass:
True love will raise, not sink,—alas!
How fades my Pilot's Daughter!

Raise her, perhaps?—But ah! I said,
'Twere wiser let such thoughts alone.
So may thy beauty, simple maid,
Be mine, yet all thy own:
Joined in my free, contented love
With these fair gathering stars above—
Before whose stedfast truth it seems

That “Rich” and “Poor” are as the beams
And shadows on the river-streams
That soon will sing thee into dreams.
So passed the Pilot's Daughter.