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When, for the crowning vernal sweet,
Among the slopes and crags I meet
The pilot's pretty daughter.

Round her gentle, happy face,
Dimpled soft, and freshly fair,
Danced with careless ocean grace
Locks of auburn hair:

As lightly blew the veering wind, They touched her cheeks, or waved behind,

Unbound, unbraided, and unlooped; Or when to tie her shoe she stooped, Below her chin the half-curls drooped,

And veiled the pilot's daughter.

Rising, she tossed them gayly back, With gesture infantine and brief, To fall around as soft a neck

As the wild-rose's leaf. Her Sunday frock of lilac shade (That choicest tint) was neatly made, And not too long to hide from view The stout but noway clumsy shoe, And stockings' smoothly-fitting blue,

That graced the pilot's daughter.

With look half timid and half droll, And then with slightly downcast eyes,

And blush that outward softly stole, Unless it were the skies

Whose sun-ray shifted on her cheek, She turned when I began to speak; But 'twas a brightness all her own That in her firm light step was

shown,

And the clear cadence of her tone; The pilot's lovely daughter.

Were it my lot (the sudden wish)

To hand a pilot's oar and sail, Or haul the dripping moonlight mesh, Spangled with herring-scale; By dying stars, how sweet 'twould be, And dawn-blow freshening the sea, With weary, cheery pull to shore, To gain my cottage home once more, And clasp, before I reach the door,

My love, the pilot's daughter.

This element beside my feet

Allures, a tepid wine of gold; One touch, one taste, dispels the cheat

'Tis salt and nipping cold: A fisher's hut, the scene perforce

Of narrow thoughts and manners coarse,

Coarse as the curtains that beseem With net-festoons the smoky beam, Would never lodge my favorite dream,

E'en with my pilot's daughter.

To the large riches of the earth,

Endowing men in their own spite, The poor, by privilege of birth, Stand in the closest right.

Yet not alone the palm grows dull With clayey delve and watery pull: And this for me, -or hourly pain. But could I sink and call it gain? Unless a pilot true, 'twere vain

To wed a pilot's daughter.

Like her, perhaps?—but ah! I said, Much wiser leave such thoughts alone.

So may thy beauty, simple maid,
Be mine, yet all thine own.
Joined in my free contented love
With companies of stars above;
Who, from their throne of airy

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