Explore "The Voice of the Sea" by Thomas Nelson Page on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Thus spake to Man the thousand-throated Sea; / Words which the stealing winds caught from its lips:
Thou thinkest thee and thine, God's topmost crown. / But hearken unto me and humbly learn / How infinite thine insignificance. / Thou boastest of thine age -- thy works -- thyself: / Thine oldest monuments of which thou prat'st / Were built but yesterday when measured by / Yon snow-domed mountains of eternal rock: / The Earth, thy mother, from whose breast thou draw'st, / The sweat-stained living which she wills to give, / And in whose dust thine own must melt again, / Was aged cycles ere thine earliest dawn; -- / But they to me are young: I gave them birth. / Climb up those heaven-tipt peaks thy dizziest height, / Thou there shalt read, graved deep, my name and age; / Dig down thy deepest depth, shalt read them still. / Before the mountains sprang, before the Earth, / Thy cradle and thy tomb, was made, I was: / God called them forth from me, as thee from Earth.