26

SANDS AT SEVENTY.

WITH HUSKY-HAUGHTY LIPS, O SEA!

With husky-haughty lips, O sea!

Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,

Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,

(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)

Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,

Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the
sun,

Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos'd hurricanes,

Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;

Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears—a lack from all
eternity in thy content,

(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make
thee greatest—no less could make thee,)

Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek'st and seek'st, yet
never gain'st,

Surely some right withheld—some voice, in huge monotonous
rage, of freedom-lover pent,

Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those
breakers,

By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath,

And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,

And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,

And undertones of distant lion roar,

(Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear—but now, rapport for
once,

A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)

The first and last confession of the globe,

Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms,

The tale of cosmic elemental passion,

Thou tellest to a kindred soul.

## SANDS AT SEVENTY

25

Joys, travels, studious silent panoramas
The long past, the dead, the沉寢中的老人
Myself through every phase of my life—old age at hand,
My three-score years of life summ'd up, and more, and past,
By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing,
And haply yet some drop within God's scheme's ensemble—some
wave, or part of wave,
Like one of yours, ye multitudinous ocean.

## THEN LAST OF ALL.

Then last of all, caught from these shores, this hill,
Of you O tides, the mystic human meaning :
Only by law of you, your swell and ebb, enclosing me the same,
The brain that shapes, the voice that chants this song.

## ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884.

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest
scene and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-
loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones—nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes—
nor Mississippi's stream:

—This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name—the
*still small voice* vibrating—America's choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous'd—sea-board and inland
—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia.