And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy I wantoned with thy breakers; they to me Were a delight; and if the freshening sea Made them a terror, 't was a pleasing fear, For I was as it were a child of thee, And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane, as I do here.

Lord Byron.

TRAVELLING.

YEASE to persuade, my loving Proteus;

CEASE

Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits: Were 't not affection chains thy tender days To the sweet glances of thy honored love, I rather would entreat thy company · To see the wonders of the world abroad, Than living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.

William Shakespeare.

THE TRAVELLER.

EMOTE, unfriended, melancholy, slow, Or by the lazy Scheld or wandering Po; Or onward, where the rude Carinthian boor Against the houseless stranger shuts the door; Or where Campania's plain forsaken lies,

A weary waste expanding to the skies;
Where'er I roam, whatever realms I see,
My heart untravelled fondly turns to thee,
Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.
Oliver Goldsmith.

T

THE WORLD AT A DISTANCE.

IS pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,
To peep at such a world; to see the stir
Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;
To hear the roar she sends through all her gates,
At a safe distance, where the dying sound
Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.
Thus sitting and surveying thus at ease
The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced
To some secure and more than mortal height,
That liberates and exempts me from them all.
It turns submitted to my view, turns round
With all its generations; I behold

The tumult, and am still. The sound of war
Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me;
Grieves, but alarms me not. I mourn the pride
And avarice that make man a wolf to man,
Hear the faint echo of those brazen throats,
By which he speaks the language of his heart,
And sigh, but never tremble at the sound.
He travels and expatiates, as the bee

From flower to flower, so he from land to land:

The manners, customs, policy of all

Pay contribution to the store he gleans;
He sucks intelligence in every clime,

And spreads the honey of his deep research
At his return, a rich repast for me.

He travels, and I too. I tread his deck,
Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes
Discover countries, with a kindred heart
Suffer his woes, and share in his escapes;
While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.
William Cowper.

HIGHWAYS.

WHO doth not love to follow with his eye

WHO

The winding of a public way? the sight,
Familiar object as it is, hath wrought
On my imagination since the morn
Of childhood, when a disappearing line,
One daily present to my eyes, that crossed
The naked summit of a far-off hill

Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,
Was like an invitation into space
Boundless, or guide into eternity.

Yes, something of the grandeur which invests
The mariner who sails the roaring sea

Through storm and darkness, early in my mind
Surrounded too the wanderers of the earth;
Grandeur as much, and loveliness far more.

William Wordsworth.

WRITTEN AT AN INN AT HENLEY.

O thee, fair Freedom! I retire

то

From flattery, cards and dice, and din; Nor art thou found in mansions higher Than the low cot or humble Inn.

"Tis here with boundless power I reign;
And every health which I begin
Converts dull port to bright champagne ;
Such freedom crowns it, at an Inn.

I fly from pomp, I fly from plate!
I fly from Falsehood's specious grin!
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an Inn.

Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,

Which lackeys else might hope to win;
It buys what courts have not in store,
It buys me freedom at an Inn.

Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round,

Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an Inn.

William Shenstone.

PLACES.

N the heart's album there are treasured faces,

IN

Our household darlings, friends which are our own, And with them favorite haunts and cherished places, So dear, they seem but made for us alone.

Old age remembers over misty distance

The brook the boy once loved; its scent of flowers Comes wafted from it yet with sweet persistence, And builds again for him those vanished hours.

He feels once more his bare feet in the stubble,
His jointed fishing-rod, his bat and ball,
Till, flown from dreary days and thoughts of trouble,
His pulses still sing music through it all.

Later, the sea-shore, haunt of vague emotion,
Where his thoughts travelled on the gleaming wave,
Or rose in flowering hopes, as smitten ocean
Shot jets of thundrous splendor round his cave.

The sacred path, which two once trod enchanted,
And now but one, and he with faltering tread,
Feeling its grassy curves and hollows haunted

By watching eyes, whose light is with the dead.

Then there are favorite nooks of early travel,

Where dreaming idly on the summer grass,
He saw the Swiss cascades their threads unravel,
And evening strike above the shadowy pass.