When there wakes any wind to shake this place,
This wave-hemmed atom of land on which I dwell,
My fancy conquers time, condition, space, -
A trivial sound begets a miracle!
Last night there walked a wind, and, through chink,
It made one pan upon another clink
Where each hung close together on a nail -
Then fantasy put forth her fullest sail;
A dawn that never dies came back to me:
I heard two ship's bells echoing far at sea!
As perfect as a poet dreams a star
It was a full-rigged ship bore down the wind,
Piled upward with white-crowding spar on spar:
The wonder of it never leaves my mind.
We passed her moving proudly far at sea;
Night was not quite yet gone, nor day begun;
She stood, a phantom of sheer loveliness,
Against the first flush of an ocean dawn;
Then at the elevation of the sun,
Her ship's bell faintly sounded the event,
While ours with a responding tinkle went.
The beauty life evokes, outlasting men,
It fills my world from sea to sky again;
It opens on me like a shining scroll -
The ghost of God that ever haunts the soul!
