'Tis eventide and the sun is dying,
Painting the sky in its roseate beam,
And out to sea-ward the cloud-ranks lying,
Are crimson-bright in his parting beam;
In dazzling light o'er the waves extending,
In burnished glow on each foamy crest,
At the golden portals of sunset ending,
Its pathway illumines the ocean's breast.
Oh! light of the sunset, soft and tender,
Oh! waves that shine in the rosy glow,
Oh! mountains, so grand in your hoary splendour,
Oh! billowy ocean that heaves below!

Oh! rolling waves, that are ever beating,
In wild, sweet music along the shore,
Tell me tales ye are still repeating,
Sighing and moaning forever more;
In seething foam 'mong the grey rocks meeting,
Where, rushing, ye break in doleful roar!

Sighing on in your restless roaming
Wailing so wildly and ceaselessly;
In the morning light, or the shadowy gloaming,
Tell me, what are thy songs, oh, sea!

Is thine the wail of a life-long sorrow,
The hopeless crying of hope long dead;
The dearth of loneness that cannot borrow
One beam of light from the brightness fed,
To point to the dawn of a fairer morrow
Far away in the future spread?

But, heedless, it rolls in its wonderous splendour,
Onward, in cadence sublime and vast;
Are these ocean-songs, in their mystic grandeur
Requiems sung for the vanished past?
It is buried and dead, yet still unsmitten,
It lives and blooms in one hidden spot,
Where in Memory's chamber each scene is written,
Graven too deeply for Time to blot!

But see! o'er the waters the light grows dimmer,
The white-winged sea-gulls to Westward fly;
Pale stars look down in a fitful glimmer
As the crimson fades from the opal sky.
I soon shall sleep, and perchance in dreaming,
I'll live again in the time that's fled,
And fancy the rays of its brightness beaming
In mellow radiance around my bed
And it may be I'll dream not of bliss that's fleeting
But of that fair life that is yet to be,
Where no cloud can arise to dim our meeting
As I stand with him by the Jasper Sea!