Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
    really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! 
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

[Fancies at Navesink]

}[I] The Pilot in the Mist

Steaming the northern rapids—­(an old St. Lawrence reminiscence,
A sudden memory-flash comes back, I know not why,
Here waiting for the sunrise, gazing from this hill;)
Again ’tis just at morning—­a heavy haze contends with daybreak,
Again the trembling, laboring vessel veers me—­I press through
    foam-dash’d rocks that almost touch me,
Again I mark where aft the small thin Indian helmsman
Looms in the mist, with brow elate and governing hand.

}[II] Had I the Choice

Had I the choice to tally greatest bards,
To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will,
Homer with all his wars and warriors—­Hector, Achilles, Ajax,
Or Shakspere’s woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—­Tennyson’s fair ladies,
Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme,
    delight of singers;
These, these, O sea, all these I’d gladly barter,
Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer,
Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse,
And leave its odor there.

}[III] You Tides with Ceaseless Swell

You tides with ceaseless swell! you power that does this work! 
You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space’s spread,
Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations,
What are the messages by you from distant stars to us? what Sirius’?
    what Capella’s? 
What central heart—­and you the pulse—­vivifies all? what boundless
    aggregate of all? 
What subtle indirection and significance in you? what clue to all in
    you? what fluid, vast identity,
Holding the universe with all its parts as one—­as sailing in a ship?

}[IV] Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning

Last of ebb, and daylight waning,
Scented sea-cool landward making, smells of sedge and salt incoming,
With many a half-caught voice sent up from the eddies,
Many a muffled confession—­many a sob and whisper’d word,
As of speakers far or hid.

How they sweep down and out! how they mutter! 
Poets unnamed—­artists greatest of any, with cherish’d lost designs,
Love’s unresponse—­a chorus of age’s complaints—­hope’s last words,
Some suicide’s despairing cry, Away to the boundless waste, and
    never again return.