Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 5.djvu/666

626

I.

as a white sail on a dusky sea,

When half the horizon 's clouded and half free,

Fluttering between the dun wave and the sky,

Is Hope's last gleam in Man's extremity.

Her anchor parts; but still her snowy sail

Attracts our eye amidst the rudest gale:

Though every wave she climbs divides us more,

The heart still follows from the loneliest shore.

II.

Not distant from the isle of Toobonai,

A black rock rears its bosom o'er the spray,

The haunt of birds, a desert to mankind,

Where the rough seal reposes from the wind,

And sleeps unwieldy in his cavern dun,

Or gambols with huge frolic in the sun:

There shrilly to the passing oar is heard

The startled echo of the Ocean bird,

Who rears on its bare breast her callow brood,

The feathered fishers of the solitude.

A narrow segment of the yellow sand

On one side forms the outline of a strand;

Here the young turtle, crawling from his shell,

Steals to the deep wherein his parents dwell;

Chipped by the beam, a nursling of the day,

But hatched for ocean by the fostering ray;