Who shall declare the secret of thy birth,
Thou old companion of the circling earth?
And having reached with keen poetic sight
Ere beast or happy bird,
Through the vast silence stirred,
Roll back the folded darkness of the primal night?

Corruption--like, thou teemedst in the graves
Of mouldering systems, with dark weltering waves
Troubling the peace of the first mother's womb;
Whose ancient awful form,
With inly--tossing storm,
Unquiet heavings kept,--a birth--place and a tomb.

Till the life--giving Spirit moved above
The face of the waters, with creative love
Warming the hidden seeds of infant light:
What time the mighty word
Through thine abyss was heard,
And swam from out thy deeps the young day heavenly bright.

Thou and the earth, twin--sisters, as they say,
In the old prime were fashioned in one day;
And therefore thou delightest evermore
With her to lie and play
The summer hours away,
Curling thy loving ripples up her quiet shore.

She is a married matron long ago,
With nations at her side; her milk doth flow
Each year: but thee no husband dares to tame;
Thy wild will is thine own,
Thy sole and virgin throne;
Thy mood is ever changing,--thy resolve the same.

Sunlight and moonlight minister to thee;
O'er the broad circle of the shoreless sea
Heaven's two great lights for ever set and rise;
While the round vault above
In vast and silent love
Is gazing down upon thee with his hundred eyes

All night thou utterest forth thy solemn moan,
Counting the weary minutes all alone;
Then in the morning thou dost calmly lie,
Deep--blue, ere yet the sun
His day--work hath begun,
Under the opening windows of the golden sky.

The Spirit of the mountain looks on thee
Over an hundred hills; quaint shadows flee
Across thy marbled mirror; brooding lie
Storm--mists of infant cloud,
With a sight--baffling shroud
Mantling the gray--blue islands in the western sky.

Sometimes thou liftest up thine hands on high
Into the tempest--cloud that blurs the sky,
Holding rough dalliance with the fitful blast;
Whose stiff breath, whistling shrill,
Pierces with deadly chill
The wet crew, feebly clinging to their shattered mast.

Foam--white along the border of the shore
Thine onward--leaping billows plunge and roar;
While o'er the pebbly ridges slowly glide
Cloaked figures, dim and gray
Through the thick mist of spray,
Watchers for some struck vessel in the boiling tide.

Daughter and darling of remotest eld,--
Time's childhood and Time's age thou hast beheld;
His arm is feeble, and his eye is dim:
He tells old tales again,
He wearies of long pain:
Thou art as at the first: thou journeyedst not with him.