Seite:Marsh Wolfe of the knoll.djvu/161

165

THE ARRIVAL.

Thy voice, now loving music, now terrible in wrath,
Thy mighty power to quicken the dullest human heart,
Declare from the beginning whose minister thou art !
Oh, still thy heavenly message of trust and patience speak
To all whose hearts are troubled, whose clouded faith is weak !

Now mark the restless stranger ! as down the crystal wave
He looks, his pulse grows calmer, his anxious brow less
  grave.
What sees he there ? A landscape, more bright, more
  strangely fair
Than ever yet hath gladdened the realms of upper air.
Over a briny ocean no longer doth he seem
Borne by a lifeless framework of canvas, bolt and beam,
But raised on spirit pinions through ether seas to go,
With the old heavens above him, and a new world below.
His brain swims as he gazes down many a fathom deep,
Where plain and hill and valley alternate past him sweep ;
Broad shining plains all sparkling with rippled sands of gold,
O'erstrewn with gem-like pebbles and radiant shells untold ;