Herman Melville

Misgivings

   WHEN ocean-clouds over inland hills
      Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
   And horror the sodden valley fills,
      And the spire falls crashing in the town,
   I muse upon my country's ills--
   The tempest burning from the waste of Time
On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.

   Nature's dark side is heeded now--
      (Ah! optimist-cheer dishartened flown)--
   A child may read the moody brow
      Of yon black mountain lone.
   With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,
   And storms are formed behind the storms we feel:
The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.