University of Virginia Library

Life's intermitting pulse again went on:
I woke amidst the beauty of a morn
That shone as bright within me as around.
The presence-chamber of the soul was full
Of flitting images and rapturous thoughts;
For eye and mind were open'd to explore
The secrets of the abyss erewhile conceal'd.
The floor of ocean, never trod by man,
Was visible to me as heaven's round roof,
Which man hath never touch'd; the multitude
Of living things in that new hemisphere
Gleam'd out of darkness, like the stars at midnight,
When moon nor clouds, with light or shade, obscure them.
For, as in hollows of the tide-worn reef,
Left at low water glistening in the sun,
Pellucid pools and rocks in miniature,
With their small fry of fishes, crusted shells,
Rich mosses, tree-like sea-weed, sparkling pebbles,
Enchant the eye, and tempt the eager hand
To violate the fairy paradise,
—So to my view the deep disclosed its wonders.

In the free element beneath me swam,
Flounder'd, and dived, in play, in chase, in battle,
Fishes of every colour, form, and kind,
(Strange forms, resplendent colours, kinds unnumber'd,)
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Hath never seen; from dread Leviathan,
To insect millions peopling every wave;
And nameless tribes, half-plant, half-animal,
Rooted and slumbering through a dream of life.
The livelier inmates to the surface sprang,
To taste the freshness of heaven's breath, and feel
That light is pleasant, and the sunbeam warm.
Most in the middle region sought their prey,
Safety, or pastime; solitary some,
And some in pairs affectionately join'd;
Others in shoals immense, like floating islands,
Led by mysterious instinct through that waste
And trackless region, though on every side
Assaulted by voracious enemies,
—Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw
With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs.
While ravening Death of slaughter ne'er grew weary,
Life multiplied the immortal meal as fast.
War, reckless, universal war, prevail'd:
All were devourers, all in turn devour'd;
Yet every unit in the uncounted sum
Of victims had its share of bliss, its pang,
And but a pang, of dissolution; each
Was happy till its moment came, and then
Its first, last suffering, unforeseen, unfear'd,
Closed, with one struggle, pain and life for ever.
So He ordain'd, whose way is in the sea,
His path amidst great waters, and His steps
Unknown;—whose judgments are a mighty deep,
Where plummet of archangel's intellect
Could never yet find soundings, but from age
To age let down, drawn up, then thrown again,
With lengthen'd line and added weight, still fails;
And still the cry in Heaven is, “O the depth!”

Thus, while bewilder'd with delight I gazed
On life in every shape it here assumed,
Congenial feeling made me follow it,
And try to be whatever I beheld:
By mental transmigration thus I pass'd
Through many a body, and in each assay'd
New instincts, powers, enjoyments, death itself;
Till, weary with the fanciful pursuit,
I started from that idle reverie.
Then grew my heart more desolate than ever;
Here had I found the beings which I sought,
—Beings for whom the universe was made,
Yet none of kindred with myself. In vain
I strove to waken sympathy in breasts
Cold as the element in which they moved,
And inaccessible to fellowship
With me, as sun and stars, as winds and vapours:
Sense had they, but no more; mind was not there.
They roam'd, they fed, they slept, they died, and left
Race after race to roam, feed, sleep, then die,
And leave their like through endless generations;
—Incessant change of actors, none of scene,
Through all that boundless theatre of strife!
Shrinking into myself again, I cried,
In bitter disappointment,—“Is this all?”

I sent a glance at random, from the cloud
In which I then lay floating through mid-heaven,
To ocean's innermost recess;—when lo!
Another seal of Nature's book was open'd,
Which held transported thought so deep entranced,
That Time, though borne through mightiest revolutions,
Seem'd, like the earth in motion, to stand still.
The works of ages grew beneath mine eye:
As rapid intellect calls up events,
Combines, compresses, moulds them, with such power,
That in a little page of memory
An empire's annals lie,—a nation's fortunes
Pass in review, as motes through sunbeams pass,
Glistening and vanishing in quick succession,
Yet each distinct as though there were but one;
—So, thrice a thousand years, with all their issues,
Hurried before me, through a gleam of time,
Between the clouds of two eternities,—
That whence they came, and that to which they tended.

Immeasurable continents beneath
The expanse of animated waters lay,
Not strown—as I have since discern'd the tracks
Of voyagers—with shipwrecks and their spoils,
The wealth of merchants, the artillery
Of war, the chains of captives, and the gems
That glow'd upon the brow of beauty; crowns
Of monarchs, swords of heroes, anchors lost,
That never had let go their hold in storms;
Helms, sunk in port, that steer'd adventurous barks
Round the wide world; bones of dead men, that made
A hidden Golgotha where they had fallen,
Unseen, unsepulchred, but not unwept
By lover, friend, relation, far away,
Long waiting their return to home and country,
And going down into their fathers' graves
With their gray hairs or youthful locks in sorrow,
To meet no more till seas give up their dead:
Some, too—ay, thousands—whom none living mourn'd,
None miss'd—waifs in the universe, the last
Lorn links of kindred chains for ever sunder'd.

Not such the spectacle I now survey'd:
No broken hearts lay here; no aching heads,
For whose vast schemes the world was once too small,
And life too short, in Death's dark lap found rest
Beneath the unresting wave;—but skeletons
Of whales and krakens here and there were scatter'd,
The prey when dead of tribes, their prey when living;
And,—seen by glimpses, but awakening thoughts
Too sad for utterance,—relics huge and strange
Of the whole world that perish'd by the flood,
Kept under chains of darkness till the judgment.
—Save these, lay ocean's bed, as from the hand
Of its Creator, hollow'd and prepared
For His unfathomable counsels there,
To work slow miracles of power divine,
From century to century,—nor less
Incomprehensible than heaven and earth
Form'd in six days by His commanding word.
With God a thousand years are as one day;
He in one day can sum a thousand years:
All acts with Him are equal; for no more
It costs Omnipotence to build a world,
And set a sun amidst the firmament,
Than mould a dew-drop, and light up its gem.

This was the landscape stretch'd beneath the flood:
—Rocks branching out like chains of Alpine mountains;
Gulfs intervening, sandy wildernesses,
Forests of growth enormous, caverns, shoals;
Fountains up-springing, hot and cold, and fresh
And bitter, as on land; volcanic fires
Fiercely out-flashing from earth's central heart,
Nor soon extinguish'd by the rush of waters
Down the rent crater to the unknown abyss
Of Nature's laboratory, where she hides
Her deeds from every eye except her Maker's:
—Such were the scenes which ocean open'd to me;
Mysterious regions, the recluse abode
Of unapproachable inhabitants,
That dwelt in everlasting darkness there.
Unheard by them the roaring of the wind,
The elastic motion of the wave unfelt;
Still-life was theirs, well pleasing to themselves,
Nor yet unuseful, as my song shall show.

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 mark'd 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-employ'd,
Yet but an agent in one common work,
The sum of all their individual labours.
Shapeless they seem'd, but endless shapes assumed;
Elongated like worms, they writhed and shrunk
Their tortuous bodies to grotesque dimensions;
Compress'd like wedges, radiated like stars,
Branching like sea-weed, whirl'd 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, perform'd its little task;
—To build its dwelling and its sepulchre,
From its own essence exquisitely modell'd;
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 seal'd, 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 tow'rds the day.
Each wrought alone, yet 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 them;
Hence what Omnipotence alone could do,
Worms did. I saw the living pile ascend,
The mausoleum of its architects,
Still dying upwards as their labours closed:
Slime the material, but the slime was turn'd
To adamant by their petrific touch;
Frail were their frames, ephemeral their lives,
Their masonry imperishable. All
Life's needful functions, food, exertion, rest,
By nice economy of Providence
Were overruled to carry on the process
Which out of water brought forth solid rock.

Atom by atom thus the burden grew,
Even like an infant in the womb, till Time
Deliver'd ocean of that monstrous birth,
—A coral island, stretching east and west,
In God's own language to its parent saying,
“Thus far, nor farther, shalt thou go; and here
Shall thy proud waves be stay'd:”—A point at first,
It peer'd above those waves; a point so small,
I just perceived it, fix'd where all was floating;
And when a bubble cross'd it, the blue film
Expanded, like a sky above the speck;
That speck became a hand-breadth; day and night
It spread, accumulated, and ere long
Presented to my view a dazzling plain,
White as the moon amid the sapphire sea;
Bare at low water, and as still as death;
But when the tide came gurgling o'er the surface,
'Twas like a resurrection of the dead:
From graves innumerable, punctures fine
In the close coral, capillary swarms
Of reptiles, horrent as Medusa's snakes,
Cover'd the bald-pate reef; then all was life,
And indefatigable industry;
The artisans were twisting to and fro,
In idle-seeming convolutions; yet
They never vanish'd with the ebbing surge,
Till pellicle on pellicle, and layer
On layer, was added to the growing mass.
Ere long the reef o'ertopt the spring-flood's height,
And mock'd the billows when they leap'd upon it,
Unable to maintain their slippery hold,
And falling down in foam-wreaths round its verge.
Steep were the flanks, with precipices sharp,
Descending to their base in ocean-gloom.
Chasms few, and narrow, and irregular,
Form'd harbours safe at once and perilous,—
Safe for defence, but perilous to enter.
A sea-lake shone amidst the fossil isle,
Reflecting in a ring its cliffs and caverns,
With heaven itself seen like a lake below.

Compared with this amazing edifice,
Raised by the weakest creatures in existence,
What are the works of intellectual man?
Towers, temples, palaces, and sepulchres;
Ideal images in sculptured forms,
Thoughts hewn in columns, or in domes expanded,
Fancies through every maze of beauty shown;
Pride, gratitude, affection, turn'd to marble
In honour of the living or the dead;
What are they?—fine-wrought miniatures of art,
Too exquisite to bear the weight of dew,
Which every morn lets fall in pearls upon them,
Till all their pomp sinks down in mouldering relics,
Yet in their ruin lovelier than their prime!
—Dust in the balance, atoms in the gale,
Compared with these achievements in the deep,
Were all the monuments of olden time,
In days when there were giants on the earth:
—Babel's stupendous folly, though it aim'd
To scale heaven's battlements, was but a toy,
The plaything of the world in infancy:—
The ramparts, towers, and gates of Babylon,
Built for eternity,—though, where they stood,
Ruin itself stands still for lack of work,
And Desolation keeps unbroken sabbath;—
Great Babylon, in its full moon of empire,
Even when its “head of gold” was smitten off,
And from a monarch changed into a brute;—
Great Babylon was like a wreath of sand,
Left by one tide, and cancell'd by the next:—
Egypt's dread wonders, still defying Time,
Where cities have been crumbled into sand,
Scatter'd by winds beyond the Libyan desert,
Or melted down into the mud of Nile,
And cast in tillage o'er the corn-sown fields,
Where Memphis flourish'd, and the Pharaohs reign'd;—
Egypt's gray piles of hieroglyphic grandeur,
That have survived the language which they speak,
Preserving its dead emblems to the eye,
Yet hiding from the mind what these reveal;
—Her pyramids would be mere pinnacles,
Her giant statues, wrought from rocks of granite,
But puny ornaments, for such a pile
As this stupendous mound of catacombs,
Fill'd with dry mummies of the builder-worms.

Thus far, with undiverted thought, and eye
Intensely fix'd on ocean's concave mirror,
I watch'd the process to its finishing stroke:
Then starting suddenly, as from a trance,
Once more to look upon the blessed sun,
And breathe the gladdening influence of the wind,
Darkness fell on me; giddily my brain
Whirl'd like a torch of fire that seems a circle,
And soon to me the universe was nothing.