There is a kinship with the spray Wind driven, and the restless sand, A mingling of the sea and land, The hither and the far away. Blithe atomy, bold Nature’s child Within you pulses glad and free With joyous spontaneity The tameless spirit of the wild! THE WHISTLING BUOY OFF NAUSET Voice of unutterable woe Wailing alone at sea! Borne on the shuddering winds that blow Out of the dark to me. Now far - now near To the frightened ear Comes that monody wild and free. Mingled of menace and grief and fear With a maniac chuckle of glee - O hear! That note of demoniac glee! Prophet of peril and storm, Harbinger, Triton and brute, Mariners peering to glimpse your form Cheer at your hoarse salute - That gurgling sound Of a sob half drowned That is vague as the muttering foam! Staggering drunkenly to and fro, You buffet the tide rips and undertow, A fettered gnome In the grip of the shoals below. Hark to that ominous roar Freezing the blood with dread! Vampire waves on a spectral shore Ravening over the dead. O-oo, O-oo! Is your wild adieu To the souls that the winds have sped! Breakers are howling like wolves on the trail, Foaming and gnashing and leaping the rail, Where a shrieking crew Are lost in the maddened gale. Wraith of the dangerous seas, Haunting the skeleton sands, Creature of iron and billow and breeze Wrought by a mortal’s hands. Your eerie moan So weird - so lone Is a medley of boding and rapture and groan. Roisterer, mourner and demon I wis Strangest of beings in ocean’s abyss Your elfin cry Is a note of its infinite mystery. PEAKED HILL BARS On the dread bars at Peaked Hill The sullen waves are strangely still; And o’er that eerie sand dune’s crest The winds, beguiling, seem at rest; As the wild flare of Highland Light Goes surging up into the night. What sinister serenity Pervades that graveyard of the sea, Where sand bars, white as bone, submerge Down where the tides intone a dirge For houseless and unhallowed souls - ’Tis Death who broods among the shoals! For hark, it comes, the thunderous gale That makes those dunes and beaches quail, As the wild winds and waves embroil Those shoals until they seem to boil And lift to heaven as loud a din As though the fiends were caged within. No mariners of old e’er sailed More dangerous seas. Charybdis veiled No starker terrors than those blue And greenish shallows hide from view, Where, crouched like tigers on the kill, Lurk the dread bars at Peaked Hill! THE RIME OF THE THREE CAPTAINS