On stormy nights when wild northwesters rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.
Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
Arthur Hugh Clough.
THE POET AND THE BIRD.
Said a people to a poet—"Go out from among us straightway!
While we are thinking earthly things, thou singest of divine.
There's a little fair brown nightingale, who, sitting in the gateway,
Makes fitter music to our ear, than any song of thine!"
The poet went out weeping—the nightingale ceased chanting,
"Now, wherefore, O thou nightingale, is all thy sweetness done?"—
—"I cannot sing my earthly things, the heavenly poet wanting,
Whose highest harmony includes the lowest under the sun."
The poet went out weeping,—and died abroad, bereft there.
The bird flew to his grave and died amid a thousand wails.
And, when I last came by the place, I swear the music left there
Was only of the poet's song, and not the nightingale's.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.