Sea of the brine of life!
The vague and vast suggestions of the world below the brine,
Sea-water and all living below it—
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle openings, and pink turf,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,
Breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do.

Shimmer of waters with fish in them,
The leaden-eyed shark, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
The ground-shark’s fin cuts like a black chip out of the water,
Also, there were crabs, and divers small fry;
The sperm whale at the surface blowing air and spray,
The mountainous mass, lethargic, basking, or disporting with his flukes,
The she-whale swims with her calves and never forsakes them;
The neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,
The otter is feeding on fish,
Afar on arctic ice the she-walrus lying drowsily while her cubs play around.

I saw myriads of little fish, endeavoring to get up, but balked by an obstruction—and the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, apparently in council, as if at a loss what to do. Directly two or three large eels crawled lazily along, wriggling their tails, and sucking up whatever they found on the bottom. Then came a couple of little black fish; after which a real big one, opening his great white mouth, and behaving in a very hoggish manner. 

O the strange fascination of half-known, half-impassable swamps,
The greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous moss,
The water-plants with their graceful flat heads,
The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, infested by reptiles,
Resounding with the bellow of the alligator and the whirr of the rattlesnake,
(Here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal’d hut.)
But now the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
The rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock.

The yellow-crowned heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs,
Parties of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and aquatic plants,
The beaver pats the mud with his paddle-tail,
The laughing-gull scoots by the slappy shore and laughs her near-human laugh,
To which is join’d one low purr at intervals from some impatient hylas at the pond-edge;
In a lonesome inlet a sheldrake lost from the flock, sitting on the water rocking silently.

NEXT: ON THE EARTH

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