CHILDE HAROLD'S ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN

            It was in description and meditation that Byron excelled. Yet his descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived their principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them. He was himself the beginning, the middle and the end of all his OWti poetry, the hero, of every tale, the chief object

in every landscape

. Harold, Lara, Manfred and a crowd of other characters were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; , and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of the outer world, the Tagus with the mighty fleets of England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of cork trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet lake of Leman, the dell of Egeria, with its summer birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome overgrown with ivy and wallflowers, the stars, the sea, the mountains, all were mere accessories, the background to one dark and melancholy figure.

-Macaulay.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roal:

I love not man the less, but nature more

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the universe and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin-his control

Stops with the shore upon the watery plain:

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

When, for a moment, like a drop of rain.

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknelled,

uncoffined and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths-thy fields

Are not a spoil for him-thou dost arise

And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields

For earth's destruction, thou dost all despise,

Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,

And send'st him shivering in thy playful spray

And howling, to his gods, where haply lies

His petty hope in some near port or bay,

And dashest him to earth again-there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,

And monarchs tremble in their capitals,

The oak leviathans whose huge ribs inake

Their clay creator the vain title take

Of lord of thee and arbiter of war;

These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,

They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar

Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee

­Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?

Thy waters wasted them wwe they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey

The stranger, slave or savage; their decay

Has dried up realms to deserts-not so thou

Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play.

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;

Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale or storm,

 Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving; boundless, endless and sublime;

The image of eternity-the throne

Of the Invisible; e'en from thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone

Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean; and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers-they to me

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

Made them a terror, 'twas a pleasing fear;

For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane-as I do here.

Byron.