There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
there is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in tis roar;
I love not Man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
man marks the earth with ruin-- his control
Stops with the shore;--upon the watery plain 
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When for a movement, like a drop of rain,
he sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths,--thy fields 
Are not a spoil for him,--thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields,
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
and howling , to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth:--- there let him lay.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carhage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free
And many a tyrant since: their shores obey
the stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play--
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow--
Such as creatiion's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed-- in breeze, or gale, or storm,
icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark--heaving;-- boundless, endless, and sublime---
The image  of Eternity--- the throne
Of the invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne like thy buddles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-- they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror----'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
and trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane-- as I do here.

−George Gordon Byron