I’ve watch’d the sea bird calmly glide,
Unruffled o’er the ocean tide;
Unscared she heard the waters roar,
In foaming breakers on the shore.
Fearless of ill, herself she gave
To rise upon the lifting wave,
Or sink, to be a-while unseen—
The undulating swells between—
Till, as the evening shadows grew,
Noiseless, unheard, aloft she flew;
While, soaring to her rock-built nest,
A sunbeam lighted on her breast,
A moment glitter’d in mine eye,
Then quickly vanish’d through the sky.
While by the pebbly beach I stood,
That sea-bird, on the waving flood,
Pictured, to my enraptured eye,
A soul at peace with God! —Now high,
Now low, upon the gulf of life,
Raised or depress’d, in peace or strife;
Calmly she kisses the changeful wave,
She dreads no storm—she fears no grave:
To her the world’s tumultuous roar,
Dies like the echo on the shore.
“Father,” she cries, “Thy pleasure all fulfill,
I gladly yield me to thy sovereign will;
Let earthly joys, let comforts ebb or rise,
Tranquil on Thee, my God, my soul relies.”
There, as advance the shades of night,
Long-plumed, she takes her heavenward flight;
But, as she mounts, I see her fling
A beam of glory from her wing—
A moment—to my aching sight,
Then lost in boundless fields of light.
-Extracted.