The Breeze from Shore.
[“Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the spring-time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and loftiest feelings; and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.”—Channing.]
Joy is upon the lonely seas,
When Indian forests pour
Forth, to the billow and the breeze,
Their odours from the shore;
Joy, when the soft air’s fanning sigh
Bears on the breath of Araby.
Oh! welcome are the winds that tell
A wanderer of the deep
Where, far away, the jasmines dwell,
And where the myrrh-trees weep!
Blest on the sounding surge and foam
Are tidings of the citron’s home!
The sailor at the helm they meet,
And hope his bosom stirs,
Upspringing, midst the waves, to greet
The fair earth’s messengers,
That woo him, from the moaning main,
Back to her glorious bowers again.
They woo him, whispering lovely tales
Of many a flowering glade,
And fount’s bright gleam, in island vales
Of golden-fruited shade:
Across his lone ship’s wake they bring
A vision and a glow of spring.
And, O ye masters of the lay!
Come not even thus your songs
That meet us on life’s weary way,
Amidst her toiling throngs?
Yes! o’er the spirit thus they bear
A current of celestial air.
Their power is from the brighter clime
That in our birth hath part;
Their tones are of the world, which time
Sears not within the heart:
They tell us of the living light
In its green places ever bright.
They call us, with a voice divine,
Back to our early love,—
Our vows of youth at many a shrine,
Whence far and fast we rove.
Welcome high thought and holy strain
That make us Truth’s and Heaven’s again!