In livid and obdurate gloom he darkens down at last;

A shapely one he is, and strong, as e'er from cat was cast.

O trusted and trustworthy guard, if thou hadst life like me, What pleasures would thy toils reward beneath the deep green sea!

O deep sea-diver, who might then behold such sights as thou? The hoary monster's palaces! methinks what joy 'twere now To go plumb plunging down amid the assembly of the whales, And feel the churned sea round me boil beneath their scourging tails!

Then deep in tangle-woods to fight the fierce sea-unicorn,

And send him foiled and bellowing back, for all his ivory horn; To leave the subtile sworder-fish of bony blade forlorn;

And for the ghastly-grinning shark to laugh his jaws to scorn; To leap down on the kraken's back, where 'mid Norwegian isles

He lies, a lubber anchorage for sudden shallowed miles;

Till snorting, like an under-sea volcano, off he rolls;

Meanwhile to swing, a-buffeting the far astonished shoals Of his back-browsing ocean-calves; or, haply in a cove, Shell-strewn, and consecrate of old to some Undine's love, To find the long-haired maidens; or, hard by icy lands,

To wrestle with the sea-serpent, upon cerulean sands.

O broad-armed fisher of the deep. whose sports can equal thine? The Dolphin weighs a thousand tons, that tugs thy cable line;

And night by night, 'tis thy delight,

thy glory day by day, Through sable sea and breaker white,

the giant game to play, But shamer of our little sports! forgive the name I gave,

A fisher's joy is to destroy, - thine office is to save.

OUR bugles sang truce; for the night-cloud had lowered,

And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;

And thousands had sunk on the ground overpowered,

The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,

By the wolf-scaring fagot that guarded the slain,

At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw,

And thrice ere the morning I dreamt it again.

Methought from the battle-field's dreadful array

Far, far I had roamed on a desolate track: