There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows. The lamps that shone o'er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, And all went merryas a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!
The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers.
I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.
I have desired to go Where springs not fail, To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea.
It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shoresand with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns.
This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell
Who wants to be a millionaire? And go to ev'ry swell affair?
An admiral red, whose only notion, (A butterfly poised on a pigtailed ocean) Is of the peruked sea whose swell Breaks on the flowerless rocks of Hell.
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