A point at first It peered above those waves; a point so small I just perceived it, fixed where all was floating; And when a bubble crossed it, the blue film Expanded like a sky above the speck;
Left by one tide and cancelled by the next; Egypt's dread wonders, still defying Time, Where cities have been crumbled into sand, Scattered by winds beyond the Libyan desert, Or melted down into the mud of Nile,
That speck became a hand-breadth; day and night | And cast in tillage o'er the corn-sown fields,
Erelong the reef o'ertopt the spring-flood's height,
And mocked the billows when they leapt upon it,
Unable to maintain their slippery hold,
And falling down in foam-wreaths round its verge.
Steep were the flanks, with precipices sharp,
Descending to their base in ocean gloom.
Chasms few and narrow and irregular
Formed harbors, safe at once and perilous,
Safe for defence, but perilous to enter.
A sea-lake shone amidst the fossil isle,
Reflecting in a ring its cliffs and caverns,
With heaven itself seen like a lake below.
Compared with this amazing edifice, Raised by the weakest creatures in existence, What are the works of intellectual man? Towers, temples, palaces, and sepulchres; Ideal images in sculptured forms,
Thoughts hewn in columns, or in domes expanded,
Fancies through every maze of beauty shown ;
Pride, gratitude, affection turned to marble,
In honor of the living or the dead;
What are they?-fine-wrought miniatures of art,
Too exquisite to bear the weight of dew,
Which every morn lets fall in pearls upon them,
Till all their pomp sinks down in mouldering relics,
Yet in their ruin lovelier than their prime !
Dust in the balance, atoms in the gale,
Compared with these achievements in the deep,
Were all the monuments of olden time,
In days when there were giants on the earth.
Babel's stupendous folly, though it aimed
To scale heaven's battlements, was but a toy,
The plaything of the world in infancy;
The ramparts, towers, and gates of Babylon,
Built for eternity, though, where they stood,
Ruin itself stands still for lack of work,
And Desolation keeps unbroken Sabbath;
Great Babylon, in its full moon of empire,
Even when its "head of gold" was smitten off
And from a monarch changed into a brute
Great Babylon was like a wreath of sand,
Where Memphis flourished, and the Pharaohs
Egypt's gray piles of hieroglyphic grandeur,
That have survived the language which they speak,
Preserving its deed emblems to the eye,
Yet hiding from the mind what these reveal;
Her pyramids would be mere pinnacles,
Her giant statues, wrought from rocks of granite
But puny ornaments for such a pile
As this stupendous mound of catacombs,
Filled with dry mummies of the builder-worms.
DEEP in the wave is a coral grove,
Where the purple mullet and gold-fish rove;
Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue
That never are wet with falling dew,
But in bright and changeful beauty shine
Far down in the green and glassy brine.
The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift,
And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow;
From coral rocks the sea-plants lift
Their boughs, where the tides and billows flow;
The water is calm and still below,
For the winds and waves are absent there,
And the sands are bright as the stars that glow
In the motionless fields of upper air.
There, with its waving blade of green,
The sea-flag streams through the silent water,
And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen
To blush, like a banner bathed in slaughter.
There, with a light and easy motion,
The fan-coral sweeps through the clear, deep sea;
And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean
Are bending like corn on the upland lea.
And life, in rare and beautiful forms,
Is sporting amid those bowers of stone,
And is safe when the wrathful spirit of storms
Has made the top of the wave his own.
And when the ship from his fury flies,
Where the myriad voices of ocean roar,
When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies,
And demons are waiting the wreck on shore,
Then, far below, in the peaceful sea,
The purple mullet and gold-fish rove,
Where the waters murmur tranquilly,
Through the bending twigs of the coral grove.
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL
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