THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,
And central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation. Here you stand,
Adore, and worship, when you know it not;
Pious beyond the intention of your thought,
Devout above the meaning of your will.

115

Wordsworth.

SHELL AND HEART.

`AKE the bright shell

TA

From its home on the lea,

And wherever it goes

It will sing of the sea;

So take the fond heart

From its home and its hearth,

It will sing of the loved

To the ends of the earth.

Anon.

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

HIS is the ship of pearl which, poets feign,

TH

Sails the unshadowed main,

The venturous bark that flings

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings,
In gulfs enchanted where the siren sings,

And coral reefs lie bare,

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming

hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl,—

Wrecked is the ship of pearl !

And every chambered cell,

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,-

Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed.

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old

no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea!

Cast from her lap forlorn,

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn.

While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings :

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

O. W. Holmes.

A SEA SHELL.

117

A SEA SHELL.

EE what a lovely shell,

SEE

Small and pure as a pearl,

Lying close to my foot,

Frail, but a work divine,

Made so fairily well

With delicate spire and whorl,

How exquisitely minute,
A miracle of design!

What is it? a learned man

Could give it a clumsy name.
Let him name it who can,
The beauty would be the same.

The tiny cell is forlorn,
Void of the little living will
That made it stir on the shore.
Did he stand at the diamond door
Of his house in a rainbow frill?
Did he push, when he was uncurl'd,
A golden foot or a fairy horn
Thro' his dim water-world?
Slight, to be crush'd with a tap
Of my finger-nail on the sand,
Small, but a work divine,
Frail, but of force to withstand,
Year upon year, the shock

Of cataract seas that snap

The three decker's oaken spine
Athwart the ledges of rock,
Here on the Breton strand!

Tennyson.

Q

A FISHING-TOWN.

UAINT clusters of gray houses crowding down
Unto a river's edge; the river wide,
And flecked with fishing-boats beyond the town,
Incoming with the slow incoming tide.
Moored to the old pier-end, a smack or two
Slow dandled by the shoreward-setting swell,
And with their nets with every dip wet through,
Show their black, pitchy ribs. Some far ship's bell
Comes in the capful of light wind that hails
From seaward; while still louder and more loud,
Beneath the lowering hood of ashen cloud,

Rings the hoarse fisher's shout. There nearing sails
Loom large and shadowy; and the sunset gun
Tells that another day is o'er and done.

Anon.

SUMMER-CHEMISTRY.

WHAT does it take

A day to make,—

A day at the Bear Camp Ossipee?

White clouds a-sail in the shining blue,
With shadows dropt to dredge the lands;
A mountain-wind, and a marching storm,
And a sound in the trees like waves on sands;

A mist to soften the shaggy side

Of the great green hill, till it lies as dim

As the hills in a childhood memory;

SUMMER-CHEMISTRY.

The back of an upland pasture steep,
With delicate fern-beds notching wide
The dark wood-line, where the birches keep
Candlemas all the summer-tide;

The crags and the ledges silver-chased
Where yesterday's rainy runlets raced ;
Brown-flashing across the meadows bright
The stream that gems their malachite;
And, watching his valley, Chocorua grim!
And a golden sunset watching him!

Add fifty lives of young and old,
Of tired and sad, of strong and bold,
And every heart a deeper sea
Than its own owner dreams can be ;
Add eyes whose glances have the law

Of coursing planets in their draw;
Add careless hands that touch and part,—
And hands that greet with a heaven's sense;

Add little children in their glee

Uprunning to a mother's knee,
Their earliest altar; add her heart,

Their feeble, brooding Providence :

Add this to that, and thou shalt see
What goes to summer-chemistry,---
What the God takes

Each time he makes

One summer-day at Ossipee.

119

W. C. Gannett.