The inhabitants of other worlds behold Our orb more lucid for thy spacious share On earth’s rotundity; and is he not A blind worm in the dust, great Deep, the man Who sees not or who seeing has no joy In thy magnificence? What though thou art Unconscious and material, thou canst reach The inmost immaterial mind’s recess, And with thy tints and motion stir its chords To music, like the light on Memnon’s lyre! The Spirit of the Universe in thee Is visible; thou hast in thee the life— The eternal, graceful, and majestic life— Of nature and the natural human heart Is therefore bound to thee with holy love. Earth has her gorgeous towns; the earth-circling sea Has spires and mansions more amusive still— Men’s volant homes that measure liquid space On wheel or wing. The chariot of the land With pained and panting steeds and clouds of dust Has no sight-gladdening motion like these fair Careerers with the foam beneath their bows, Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night, Moored as they cast the shadows of their masts In long array, or hither flit and yond Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights, Like spirits on the darkness of the deep. There is a magnet-like attraction in These waters to the imaginative power That links the viewless with the visible, And pictures things unseen. To realms beyond Yon highway of the world my fancy flies, When by her tall and triple mast we know Some noble voyager that has to woo The trade-winds and to stem the ecliptic surge. The coral groves—the shores of conch and pearl, Where she will cast her anchor and reflect Her cabin-window lights on warmer waves, And under planets brighter than our own: The nights of palmy isles, that she will see Lit boundless by the fire-fly—all the smells Of tropic fruits that will regale her—all The pomp of nature, and the inspiriting Varieties of life she has to greet, Come swarming o’er the meditative mind. True, to the dream of Fancy, Ocean has His darker hints; but where’s the element That chequers not its usefulness to man. With casual terror? Scathes not Earth sometimes Her children with Tartarean fires, or shakes Their shrieking cities, and, with one last clang Of bells for their own ruin, strews them flat As riddled ashes—silent as the grave? Walks not Contagion on the Air itself? I should—old Ocean’s Saturnalian days And roaring nights of revelry and sport With wreck and human woe—be loth to sing; For they are few and all their ills weigh light Against his sacred usefulness, that bids Our pensile globe revolve in purer air. Here Morn and Eve with blushing thanks receive Their fresh’ning dews, gay fluttering breezes cool Their wings to fan the brow of fevered climes, And here the Spring dips down her emerald urn For showers to glad the earth.