coming on, and the beautiful stars, "the lovely forget-me-nots of the angels were blossoming in the infinite meadows of heaven." Overhead was the sky as silent as a summer cloud; and 'before him was the sea ever changing, ever heaving, ever restless as in the ages. A wave caught his attention, and he said:—
Dost thiou seek a star, with thy swelling crest,
O wave, that leavest thy mother's breast?
Dost thou leap from the prisoned depths below,
In scorn of their calm and constant flow?
Or art thou seeking some distant land,
To die in murmurs upon the strand?"
A prophet, scholar and poet—his mind sweeps overt he wrecks of navies and armadas, and visions of battles, where the honor of nations was contested, rise before him; and poet-like, he regards the ocean as a living, breathing, sympathizing creatture, and thus addresses it:
"Hast thou tales to tell of the pearl-lit deep,
Where the wave-whelmed mariner rocks in sleep?
Canst thou speak of navies that sunk in pride
Ere the roll of their thunder in echo died?
What trophies, what banners are floating free
In the shadowy depths of that silent sea!"
But when the poet comes down with his message from the mountain of the ideal into the plain of the real, he regards the land and the sea with
