Chapter II

Night is above me ...
And Night is above the night.
Rocks are about me, and, beyond, the sand ...
And the low reluctant tide,
That rushes back to ebb a last farewell
To the flotsam borne so long upon its breast.
Rocks ... But the tide is out,
And the slime lies naked, like a thing ashamed
That has no hiding-place.
And the sea-bird hushes--
The bird and all far cries within my blood--
And earth as a somnambulist moves on.

CHARTINGS

There is no moon, only the sea and stars;
There is no land, only the vessel's bow
On which I stand alone and wonder how
Men ever dream of ports beyond the bars
Of Finitude that fix the Here and Now.
A meteor falls, and foam beneath me breaks;
Dim phosphor fires within it faintly die.
So soft the sea is that it seems a sky
On which eternity to life awakes.

The universe is spread before my face,
Worlds where perchance a million seas like this
Are flowing and where tides of pain and bliss
Find, as on earth, so prevalent a place
That nothing of their wont we there should miss.
The Universe, that man has dared to say
Is but one Being--ah, courageous thought!
Which is so vast that hope itself is fraught
With shame, while saying it, and shrinks away.

Shrinks, even as now! For clouds sweep up the skies
And darken the wide waters circling round,
From out whose deep arises the old sound
Of Terror unto which no tongue replies
But Faith--that nothing ever shall confound.
Not only pagan Perseus but the Cross
Is shrouded--with wild wind and wilder rain,
That on me beat until my soul again
Sings unsurrendering to fears of Loss.

For this I know,--yea, tho all else lie hid
Uncharted on the waters of our fate,
All lands of Whence or Whither, whose estate
In vain imagination seeks to thrid,
Yet cannot, for the fog within Death's gate,--
This thing I know, that life, whatever its Source
Or Destiny, comes with an upward urge,
And that we cannot thwart its mighty surge,
But with a joy in strife must keep the course.

THE TRAIL FROM THE SEA

I took the trail to the wooded canyon,
The trail from the sea:
For I heard a calling in me,
A landward calling irresistible in me:--

_Have done with things of the sea--things of the soul;
Have done with waters that slip away from under you.
Have done with things faithless, things unfathomable and vain;
With the vast deeps of Time and the Hereafter._

_Have done with the fog-breather, the fog-beguiler;
With the foam of the never-resting.
Have done with tides and passions, tides and mysteries for a season.
Have done with infinite yearnings cast adrift on infinite vagueness--
With never a certain sail, never a rudder sure for guidance,
With never a compass-needle free of desire._

_For the ways of earth are good, as well as sea-ways,
The peaks of it as well as ports unknown.
Not only perils matter, stormy perils, over the pathless,
Not only the shoals that sink your ship of dreams.
Not only the phantom lure of far horizons,
Not only the windy guess at the goals of God._

_But morning matters, and dew upon the rose,
And noon, shadowless noon, and simple sheep on the pastures straying.
And toil matters, amid the accustomed corn,
And peace matters, the valley-spirit of peace, unprone to wander,
Unprone to pierce to the world's end--and past it.
And zephyrs matter, that never lift up a sail,
Save that of the thistle voyaging over the meadow._

_And the lark--oh--the sunny lark--as well as the songless petrel,
Who cries the foamy length of a thousand leagues.
And silence matters, silence free of all surging,
Silence, the spirit of happiness and home._

_And oh how much the laugh of a child matters:
More than the green of an island suddenly lit by sun at dawn.
And friends, the greetings of friends, how they matter:
More than ships that meet and fling a wild ahoy and pass,
On any alien tides however enchanted.
And the face of love, the evening face of love, at a window waiting,
Shall ever a kindled Light on any long-unlifting shore,
Shall ever a Harbor Light like that light matter?_

_Ah no! so enough of the sea and the soul for a season.
Too long followed they leave life as a dream,
Reality as a mirage when port is made.
"Ever in sight of the human," is the helm-word of the wisest,
For earth is not earth to one upon the flood of infinity;
To the eye, then, it is but an atom-star, adrift, and oh,
No longer warm with the beating of countless hearts._

_No longer warm with the human throb--the simple breath of today,
With yester-hours or the near dreams of to-morrow.
No longer rich with the little innumerous blooms of brief delights,
Nor all divinely drenched with sympathy.
No longer green with the humble grass of duties that must grow,
To clothe it against desert aridity.
No longer zoned with the air of hope, no longer large with faith--
No longer heaven enough--if Heaven fails us!_

HAUNTED SEAS

A gleaming glassy ocean,
Under a sky of gray;
A tide that dreams of motion,
Or moves, as the dead may;
A bird that dips and wavers
Over lone waters round,
Then with a cry that quavers
Is gone--a spectral sound.

The brown sad sea-weed drifting
Far from the land, and lost.
The faint warm fog unlifting,
The derelict long-tossed,
But now at rest--tho haunted
By the death-scenting shark,
Whose prey no more undaunted
Slips from it, spent and stark.

SEA LURE

(_The Maine Coast_)

It is so, O sea! wild roses
Bloom here in the scent of your brine.
And the juniper round them closes,
And the bays amid them twine,
To guard and to praise their beauty;
And the gulls above them cry,
And the stern rocks stand on duty,
Where the surf beats white and high.

It is so, O sea! wild roses,
With the day-long fog bedrenched,
Have come from their inland closes
With a thirst for you unquenched.
And over your cliffs they clamber,
And over your vast they gaze;
For the tides of you can enamour
Even them with their woodland ways.

Yea, the passion of you and the power
And the largeness are a lure
To even the heart of a flower,
O sea, with a heart unsure!
For love is a thing unsated,
Nor ever in any breast
Has it dwelt, all want abated,
At rest.

SONGS TO A. H. R.

I

MINGLINGS

It is the old old vision,
The moonlit sea--and you.
I cannot make disseverance
Between the two.
For all the world's wide beauty
To me you seem,
All that I love in shadow
Or glow or gleam.

It is the old old murmur,
The sea's sound and your voice.
God in his Bliss between them
Could make no choice.
For all the world's deep music
In you I hear:
Nor shall I ask death, ever,
For aught more dear.

II

LOVE AND INFINITY

Across the kindling twilight moon
A late gull wings to rest.
The sea is murmuring underneath
Its vast eternal quest.
The coast-light flashes over the tide
A red and warning eye,
And oh the world is very wide,
But you are nigh!

The stars come out from zone to zone,
The wind knows every one
And blows their message to my heart,
As it has ever done.
"They are all God's," it tells me, "all,
However huge or high."
But ah I could not trust its call--
Were you not by!