⁠The soft waves whisper and welter,
⁠Subdued, and allured to subside,
⁠By the mild night's magic: the lonely
⁠Sweet silence was soothed, not stirred,
⁠By the noiseless noise of the gleaming
⁠Glad ripples, that played and sighed,
⁠Kissed, laughed, recoiled, and relented,
⁠Whispered, flickered, and fled.
⁠No season was this for dreaming
⁠How oft, with a stormier tide,
⁠Had the wrath of the winds been vented
⁠On sons of the tribes long dead:
⁠The tribes whom time, and the changes
⁠Of things, and the stress of doom,
⁠Have erased and effaced; forgotten
⁠As wrecks or weeds of the shore
⁠In sight of the stern hill-ranges
⁠That hardly may change their gloom
⁠When the fruits of the years wax rotten
⁠And the seed of them springs no more.