Across the sea that knows no beach The Admiral of Nations guides Thy blind obedient keels to reach The harbor where thy future rides! The guns that spoke at Lexington Knew not that God was planning then The trumpet word of Jefferson To bugle forth the rights of men. To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, What was it but despair and shame? Who saw behind the cloud the sun? Who knew that God was in the flame? Had not defeat upon defeat, Disaster on disaster come, The slave’s emancipated feet Had never marched behind the drum. There is a Hand that bends our deeds To mightier issues than we planned, Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds, My country, serves Its dark command. I do not know beneath what sky Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great. Hovey’s themes are widely diverse, but they are always of the essential purports. He seems not only integral with nature, but integral with man in his ardor of sympathy for his fellows, and the swift understanding of all that makes for achievement or defeat. He had the splendid nonchalance that met everything with confident ease, and made his relation to life like that of an athlete trained to prevail. Not to be servile, not to be negative, not to be vague,—these are some of the notes of his stirring song. Even in love there is a characteristic dash and _verve_, a celebration of comradeship as the keynote of the relation, that makes it possible for him to write this sonnet, so refreshing and wholesome, and so far removed from the mawkish or effeminate: When I am standing on a mountain crest, Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, My love of you leaps foaming in my breast, Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray; My heart bounds with the horses of the sea, And plunges in the wild ride of the night, Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight. Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you, Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,— No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew, But hale and hardy as the highland heather, Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills, Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills. And that other sonnet, “Faith and Fate,” with its Valkyr spirit, and its words like ringing hoofbeats: To horse, my dear, and out into the night! Stirrup and saddle and away, away! Into the darkness, into the affright, Into the unknown on our trackless way! And closing with one of his finest lines— East, to the dawn, or west or south or north! _Loose rein upon the neck of Fate—and forth!_