Old Time enamelled and embossed
  This ancient cup at an infinite cost. 
  Its frame he wrought of metal that run
  Red from the furnace of the sun. 
  Ages on ages slowly rolled
  Before the glowing mass was cold,
  And still he toiled at the antique mould,
  Turning it fast in his fashioning hand,
  Tracing circle, layer, and band,
  Carving figures quaint and strange,
  Pursuing, through many a wondrous change,
  The symmetry of a plan divine. 
  At last he poured the lustrous wine,
  Crowned high the radiant wave with light,
  And held aloft the goblet bright,
  Half in shadow, and wreathed in mist
  Of purple, amber, and amethyst.

  This is the goblet from whose brink
  All creatures that have life must drink: 
  Foemen and lovers, haughty lord
  And sallow beggar with lips abhorred. 
  The new-born infant, ere it gain
  The mother’s breast, this wine must drain. 
  The oak with its subtile juice is fed,
  The rose drinks till her cheeks are red,
  And the dimpled, dainty violet sips
  The limpid stream with loving lips. 
  It holds the blood of sun and star,
  And all pure essences that are: 
  No fruit so high on the heavenly vine,
  Whose golden hanging clusters shine
  On the far-off shadowy midnight hills,
  But some sweet influence it distils
  That slideth down the silvery rills. 
  Here Wisdom drowned her dangerous thought,
  The early gods their secrets brought;
  Beauty, in quivering lines of light,
  Ripples before the ravished sight;
  And the unseen mystic spheres combine
  To charm the cup and drug the wine.

  All day I drink of the wine and deep
  In its stainless waves my senses steep;
  All night my peaceful soul lies drowned
  In hollows of the cup profound;
  Again each morn I clamber up
  The emerald crater of the cup,
  On massive knobs of jasper stand
  And view the azure ring expand: 
  I watch the foam-wreaths toss and swim
  In the wine that o’erruns the jewelled rim,
  Edges of chrysolite emerge,
  Dawn-tinted, from the misty surge;
  My thrilled, uncovered front I lave,
  My eager senses kiss the wave,
  And drain, with its viewless draught, the lore
  That warmeth the bosom’s secret core,
  And the fire that maddens the poet’s brain
  With wild sweet ardor and heavenly pain.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE SEA.

Every calling has something of a special dialect.  Even where there is, one would think, no necessity for it, as in the conversation of Sophomores, sporting men, and reporters for the press, a dialect is forthwith partly invented, partly suffered to grow, and the sturdy stem of original English exhibits a new crop of parasitic weeds which often partake of the nature of fungi and betoken the decay of the trunk whence they spring.

Is this the case with the language of the sea?  Has the sea any language? or has each national tongue grafted into it the technology of the maritime calling?