Ay! we would each fain drive
At random, and not steer by rule.
Weakness! and worse, weakness bestowed in vain!
Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive;
We rush by coasts where we had lief remain:
Man cannot, though he would, live chance’s fool.
No! as the foaming swath
Of torn-up water, on the main,
Falls heavily away with long-drawn roar
On either side the black deep-furrowed path
Cut by an onward-laboring vessel’s prore,
And never touches the ship-side again;
Even so we leave behind,
As, chartered by some unknown Powers,
We stem across the sea of life by night,
The joys which were not for our use designed,—
The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours.
TO A GYPSY CHILD BY THE SEASHORE;
DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN.
Who taught this pleading to unpractised eyes?
Who hid such import in an infant’s gloom?
Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?
Who massed, round that slight brow, these clouds of doom?
Lo! sails that gleam a moment, and are gone;
The swinging waters, and the clustered pier.
Not idly earth and ocean labor on,
Nor idly do these sea-birds hover near.
But thou, whom superfluity of joy
Wafts not from thine own thoughts, nor longings vain,
Nor weariness, the full-fed soul’s annoy,
Remaining in thy hunger and in thy pain;
Thou, drugging pain by patience; half averse
From thine own mother’s breast, that knows not thee;
With eyes which sought thine eyes thou didst converse,
And that soul-searching vision fell on me.
Glooms that go deep as thine, I have not known;
Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.
Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own;
Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.
What mood wears like complexion to thy woe?
His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day,
Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?
—Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray.