THE NAUTILUS AND THE AMMONITE.
The Nautilus and the Ammonite,
Were launched in storm and strife;
Each sent to float in its tiny boat,
On the wide, wild sea of life.
And each could swim on the ocean’s brim,
And anon its sails could furl,
And sink to sleep in the great sea deep,
In a palace all of pearl.
And their’s was a bliss more fair than this,
That we feel in our colder time;
For they were rife in a tropic life,
In a brighter, happier clime.
They swam ’mid isles whose summer smiles
No wintry winds annoy;
Whose groves were palm, whose air was balm,
Whose life was only joy.
They roam’d all day through creek and bay,
And travers’d the ocean deep;
And at night they sank on a coral bank,
In its fairy bowers to sleep.
And the monsters vast of ages past,
They beheld in their ocean caves;
And saw them ride in their power and pride,
And sink in their billowy graves.
Thus hand in hand, from strand to strand,
They sail’d in mirth and glee;
Those fairy shells, with their crystal cells,
Twin creatures of the sea.
But they came at last to a sea long past,
And as they reach’d its shore,
The Almighty’s breath spake out in death,
And the Ammonite liv’d no more.
And the Nautilus now in its shelly prow,
As o’er the deep it strays,
Still seems to seek in bay and creek,
Its companion of other days.
And thus do we, in life’s stormy sea,
As we roam from shore to shore;
While tempest-tost, seek the lov’d—the lost,
But find them on earth no more!
G. F. Richardson.
Plate I.
Plate II.
Plate III.
Plate IV.
Plate V.
Plate VI.
Plate VII.
Plate VIII.