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(Excerpt)
THE MOON is watching in the sky; the stars | |
| Are swiftly wheeling on their golden cars; | |
| Ocean, outstretched with infinite expanse, | |
| Serenely slumbers in a glorious trance; | |
| The tide, o’er which no troubling spirits breathe, | 5 |
| Reflects a cloudless firmament beneath; | |
| Where, poised as in the centre of a sphere, | |
| A ship above and ship below appear; | |
| A double image, pictured on the deep, | |
| The vessel o’er its shadow seems to sleep: | 10 |
| Yet, like the host of heaven, that never rest, | |
| With evanescent motion to the west | |
| The pageant glides through loneliness and night, | |
| And leaves behind a rippling wake of light. * * * * * | |
| Light-breathing gales awhile their course propel, | 15 |
| The billows roll with pleasurable swell, | |
| Till the seventh dawn; when o’er the pure expanse | |
| The sun, like lightning, throws his earliest glance, | |
| “Land! Land!” exclaims the ship-boy from the mast, | |
| “Land! Land!” with one electric shock hath passed | 20 |
| From lip to lip, and every eye hath caught | |
| The cheering glimpse so long, so dearly sought: | |
| Yet must imagination half supply | |
| The doubtful streak, dividing sea and sky; | |
| Nor clearly known, till, in sublimer day, | 25 |
| From icy cliffs refracted splendors play, | |
| And clouds of sea-fowl high in ether sweep, | |
| Or fall like stars through sunshine on the deep. | |
| ’T is Greenland! but so desolately bare, | |
| Amphibious life alone inhabits there; | 30 |
| ’T is Greenland! yet so beautiful the sight, | |
| The Brethren gaze with undisturbed delight: | |
| In silence (as before the throne) they stand, | |
| And pray, in prospect of that promised land, | |
| That He, who sends them thither, may abide | 35 |
| Through the waste howling wilderness their guide; | |
| And the Good Shepherd seek his straying flocks, | |
| Lost on those frozen waves and herbless rocks, | |
| By the still waters of his comforts lead, | |
| And in the pastures of salvation feed. * * * * * | 40 |
| Behold a scene, magnificent and new; | |
| Nor land nor water meets the excursive view; | |
| The round horizon girds one frozen plain, | |
| The mighty tombstone of the buried main, | |
| Where, dark and silent, and unfelt to flow, | 45 |
| A dead sea sleeps with all its tribes below. | |
| But heaven is still itself; the deep-blue sky | |
| Comes down with smiles to meet the glancing eye, | |
| Though, if a keener sight its bound would trace, | |
| The arch recedes through everlasting space. | 50 |
| The sun, in morning glory, mounts his throne, | |
| Nor shines he here in solitude unknown; | |
| North, south, and west, by dogs or reindeer drawn, | |
| Careering sledges cross the unbroken lawn, | |
| And bring, from bays and forelands round the coast, | 55 |
| Youth, beauty, valor, Greenland’s proudest boast, | |
| Who thus, in winter’s long and social reign, | |
| Hold feasts and tournaments upon the main, | |
| When, built of solid floods, his bridge extends | |
| A highway o’er the gulf to meeting friends, | 60 |
| Whom rocks impassable, or winds and tide, | |
| Fickle and false, in summer months divide. | |
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| The scene runs round with motion, rings with mirth, | |
| —No happier spot upon the peopled earth; | |
| The drifted snow to dust the travellers beat, | 65 |
| The uneven ice is flint beneath their feet. | |
| Here tents, a gay encampment, rise around, | |
| Where music, song, and revelry resound; | |
| There the blue smoke upwreathes a hundred spires, | |
| Where humbler groups have lit their pine-wood fires. | 70 |
| Erelong they quit the tables; knights and dames | |
| Lead the blithe multitude to boisterous games. | |
| Bears, wolves, and lynxes yonder head the chase; | |
| Here start the harnessed reindeer in the race; | |
| Borne without wheels, a flight of rival cars | 75 |
| Track the ice-firmament, like shooting stars, | |
| Right to the goal,—converging as they run, | |
| They dwindle through the distance into one. | |
| Where smoother waves have formed a sea of glass, | |
| With pantomimic change the skaters pass; | 80 |
| Now toil like ships ’gainst wind and stream; then wheel | |
| Like flames blown suddenly asunder; reel | |
| Like drunkards; then, dispersed in tangents wide, | |
| Away with speed invisible they glide. | |
| Peace in their hearts, death-weapons in their hands, | 85 |
| Fierce in mock-battle meet fraternal bands, | |
| Whom the same chiefs erewhile to conflict led, | |
| When friends by friends, by kindred kindred, bled. | |
| Here youthful rings with pipe and drum advance, | |
| And foot the mazes of the giddy dance; | 90 |
| Graybeard spectators, with illumined eye, | |
| Lean on their staves, and talk of days gone by; | |
| Children, who mimic all, from pipe and drum | |
| To chase and battle, dream of years to come. | |
| Those years to come, the young shall ne’er behold; | 95 |
| The days gone by no more rejoice the old. * * * * * | |
| Ocean, meanwhile, abroad hath burst the roof | |
| That sepulchred his waves; he bounds aloof. | |
| In boiling cataracts, as volcanoes spout | |
| Their fiery fountains, gush the waters out; | 100 |
| The frame of ice with dire explosion rends, | |
| And down the abyss the mingled crowd descends. | |
| Heaven! from this closing horror hide thy light; | |
| Cast thy thick mantle o’er it, gracious Night! | |
| These screams of mothers with their infants lost, | 105 |
| These groans of agony from wretches tost | |
| On rocks and whirlpools,—in thy storms be drowned, | |
| The crash of mountain-ice to atoms ground, | |
| And rage of elements!—while winds, that yell | |
| Like demons, peal the universal knell, | 110 |
| The shrouding waves around their limbs shall spread, | |
| “And Darkness be the burier of the dead.” | |
| Their pangs are o’er;—at morn the tempests cease, | |
| And the freed ocean rolls himself to peace; | |
| Broad to the sun his heaving breast expands, | 115 |
| He holds his mirror to a hundred lands; | |
| While cheering gales pursue the eager chase | |
| Of billows round immeasurable space. | |
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| Where are the multitudes of yesterday? | |
| At morn they came; at eve they passed away. | 120 |
| Yet some survive;—yon castellated pile | |
| Floats on the surges, like a fairy isle: | |
| Pre-eminent upon its peak, behold, | |
| With walls of amethyst and roofs of gold, | |
| The semblance of a city; towers and spires | 125 |
| Glance in the firmament with opal fires: | |
| Prone from those heights pellucid fountains flow | |
| O’er pearly meads, through emerald vales below. | |
| No lovelier pageant moves beneath the sky, | |
| Nor one so mournful to the nearer eye; | 130 |
| Here, when the bitterness of death had passed | |
| O’er others, with their sledge and reindeer cast, | |
| Five wretched ones in dumb despondence wait | |
| The lingering issue of a nameless fate; | |
| A bridal party;—mark yon reverend sage | 135 |
| In the brown vigor of autumnal age; | |
| His daughter in her prime; the youth, who won | |
| Her love by miracles of prowess done; | |
| With these, two meet companions of their joy, | |
| Her younger sister, and a gallant boy, | 140 |
| Who hoped, like him, a gentle heart to gain | |
| By valorous enterprise on land or main. | |
| —These, when the ocean-pavement failed their feet, | |
| Sought on a glacier’s crags a safe retreat; | |
| But in the shock, from its foundation torn, | 145 |
| That mass is slowly o’er the waters borne, | |
| An iceberg!—on whose verge all day they stand, | |
| And eye the blank horizon’s ring for land. | |
| All night around a dismal flame they weep; | |
| Their sledge, by piecemeal, lights the hoary deep | 150 |
| Morn brings no comfort: at her dawn expire | |
| The latest embers of their latest fire; | |
| For warmth and food the patient reindeer bleeds, | |
| Happier in death than those he warms and feeds. * * * * * | |
| Ages are fled; and Greenland’s hour draws nigh; | 155 |
| Sealed is the judgment; all her race must die: | |
| Commerce forsakes the unvoyageable seas, | |
| That year by year with keener rigor freeze; | |
| The embargoed waves in narrower channels roll | |
| To blue Spitzbergen and the utmost pole: | 160 |
| A hundred colonies, erewhile that lay | |
| On the green marge of many a sheltered bay, | |
| Lapse to the wilderness; their tenants throng | |
| Where streams in summer, turbulent and strong, | |
| With molten ice from inland Alps supplied, | 165 |
| Hold free communion with the breathing tide, | |
| That from the heart of ocean sends the flood | |
| Of living water round the world, like blood: | |
| But Greenland’s pulse shall slow and slower beat, | |
| Till the last spark of genial warmth retreat, | 170 |
| And, like a palsied limb of Nature’s frame, | |
| Greenland be nothing but a place and name. | |
| That crisis comes; the wafted fuel fails; | |
| The cattle perish; famine long prevails; | |
| With torpid sloth, intenser seasons bind | 175 |
| The strength of muscle and the spring of mind; | |
| Man droops, his spirits waste, his powers decay, | |
| His generation soon shall pass away. | |
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| At moonless midnight, on this naked coast, | |
| How beautiful in heaven the starry host! | 180 |
| With lambent brilliance o’er these cloister-walls, | |
| Slant from the firmament a meteor falls; | |
| A steadier flame from yonder beacon streams, | |
| To light the vessel, seen in golden dreams | |
| By many a pining wretch, whose slumbers feign | 185 |
| The bliss for which he looks at morn in vain. | |
| Two years are gone, and half expired a third | |
| (The nation’s heart is sick with hope deferred), | |
| Since last for Europe sailed a Greenland prow, | |
| Her whole marine,—so shorn is Greenland now, | 190 |
| Though once, like clouds in ether unconfined, | |
| Her naval wings were spread to every wind. | |
| The monk who sits, the weary hours to count, | |
| In the lone block-house on the beacon-mount, | |
| Watching the east, beholds the morning star | 195 |
| Eclipsed at rising o’er the waves afar, | |
| As if—for so would fond expectance think— | |
| A sail had crossed it on the horizon’s brink. | |
| His fervent soul, in ecstasy outdrawn, | |
| Glows with the shadows kindling through the dawn, | 200 |
| Till every bird that flashes through the brine | |
| Appears an armed and gallant brigantine; | |
| And every sound along the air that comes, | |
| The voice of clarions and the roll of drums. | |
| ’T is she! ’t is she! the well-known keel at last, | 205 |
| With Greenland’s banner streaming at the mast; | |
| The full-swoln sails, the spring-tide, and the breeze | |
| Waft on her way the pilgrim of the seas. | |
| The monks at matins, issuing from their cells, | |
| Spread the glad tidings; while their convent-bells | 210 |
| Wake town and country, sea and shore, to bliss | |
| Unknown for years on any morn but this. | |
| Men, women, children, throng the joyous strand, | |
| Whose mob of moving shadows o’er the sand | |
| Lengthen to giants, while the hovering sun | 215 |
| Lights up a thousand radiant points from one. | |
| The pilots launch their boats;—a race! a race! | |
| The strife of oars is seen in every face; | |
| Arm against arm puts forth its might to reach, | |
| And guide the welcome stranger to the beach. | 220 |
| Shouts from the shore, the cliffs, the boats, arise; | |
| No voice, no signal, from the ship replies; | |
| Nor on the deck, the yards, the bow, the stern, | |
| Can keenest eye a human form discern. | |
| Oh! that those eyes were opened, there to see | 225 |
| How, in serene and dreadful majesty, | |
| Sits the destroying Angel at the helm! | |
| He who hath lately marched from realm to realm | |
| And, from the palace to the peasant’s shed, | |
| Made all the living kindred to the dead: | 230 |
| Nor man alone,—dumb nature felt his wrath, | |
| Drought, mildew, murrain, strewed his carnage-path; | |
| Harvest and vintage cast their timeless fruit, | |
| Forests before him withered from the root. | |
| To Greenland now, with unexhausted power, | 235 |
| He comes commissioned; and in evil hour | |
| Propitious elements prepare his way; | |
| His day of landing is a festal day. | |
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| A boat arrives;—to those who scale the deck, | |
| Of life appears but one disastrous wreck! | 240 |
| Fallen from the rudder, which he fain had grasped, | |
| But stronger Death his wrestling hold unclasped, | |
| The film of darkness freezing o’er his eyes, | |
| A lukewarm corpse, the brave commander lies; | |
| Survivor sole of all his buried crew, | 245 |
| Whom one by one the rife contagion slew, | |
| Just when the cliffs of Greenland cheered his sight, | |
| Even from their pinnacle his soul took flight. | |
| Chilled at the spectacle, the pilots gaze | |
| One on another, lost in blank amaze; | 250 |
| But, from approaching boats when rivals throng, | |
| They seize the helm, in silence steer along, | |
| And cast their anchor, midst exulting cries, | |
| That make the rocks the echoes of the skies, | |
| Till the mysterious signs of woes to come, | 255 |
| Circled by whispers, strike the uproar dumb. | |
| Rumor affirms, that by some heinous spell | |
| Of Lapland witches crew and captain fell; | |
| None guess the secret of perfidious fate, | |
| Which all shall know too soon,—yet know too late. * * * * * | 260 |
| Comes there no ship again to Greenland’s shore? | |
| There comes another;—there shall come no more; | |
| Nor this shall reach a haven:—What are these | |
| Stupendous monuments upon the seas? | |
| Works of Omnipotence, in wondrous forms, | 265 |
| Immovable as mountains in the storms? | |
| Far as Imagination’s eye can roll, | |
| One range of Alpine glaciers to the pole | |
| Flanks the whole eastern coast; and, branching wide, | |
| Arches o’er many a league the indignant tide, | 270 |
| That works and frets, with unavailing flow, | |
| To mine a passage to the beach below; | |
| Thence from its neck that winter-yoke to rend. | |
| And down the gulf the crashing fragments send. | |
| There lies a vessel in this realm of frost, | 275 |
| Not wrecked, nor stranded, yet forever lost: | |
| Its keel embedded in the solid mass; | |
| Its glistening sails appear expanded glass; | |
| The transverse ropes with pearls enormous strung, | |
| The yards with icicles grotesquely hung, | 280 |
| Wrapt in the topmost shrouds there rests a boy, | |
| His old sea-faring father’s only joy: | |
| Sprung from a race of rovers, ocean-born, | |
| Nursed at the helm, he trod dry land with scorn; | |
| Through fourscore years from port to port he veered, | 285 |
| Quicksand, nor rock, nor foe, nor tempest feared; | |
| Now cast ashore, though like a hulk he lie, | |
| His son at sea is ever in his eye, | |
| And his prophetic thought, from age to age, | |
| Esteems the waves his offspring’s heritage: | 290 |
| He ne’er shall know, in his Norwegian cot, | |
| How brief that son’s career, how strange his lot; | |
| Writhed round the mast, and sepulchred in air, | |
| Him shall no worm devour, no vulture tear; | |
| Congealed to adamant, his frame shall last, | 295 |
| Though empires change, till time and tide be past. | |
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| On deck, in groups embracing as they died, | |
| Singly, erect, or slumbering side by side, | |
| Behold the crew!—They sailed, with hope elate, | |
| For eastern Greenland; till, ensnared by fate, | 300 |
| In toils that mocked their utmost strength and skill | |
| They felt, as by a charm, their ship stand still: | |
| The madness of the wildest gale that blows | |
| Were mercy to that shudder of repose, | |
| When withering horror struck from heart to heart | 305 |
| The blunt rebound of Death’s benumbing dart, | |
| And each, a petrifaction at his post, | |
| Looked on yon father, and gave up the ghost: | |
| He, meekly kneeling, with his hands upraised, | |
| His beard of driven snow, eyes fixed and glazed, | 310 |
| Alone among the dead shall yet survive, | |
| The imperishable dead, that seem alive; | |
| The immortal dead, whose spirits, breaking free, | |
| Bore his last words into eternity, | |
| While with a seraph’s zeal, a Christian’s love, | 315 |
| Till his tongue failed, he spoke of joys above. | |
| Now motionless, amidst the icy air, | |
| He breathes from marble lips unuttered prayer. | |
| The clouds condensed, with dark unbroken hue | |
| Of stormy purple, overhang his view, | 320 |
| Save in the west, to which he strains his sight, | |
| One golden streak, that grows intensely bright, | |
| Till thence the emerging sun, with lightning blaze, | |
| Pours the whole quiver of his arrowy rays: | |
| The smitten rocks to instant diamond turn, | 325 |
| And round the expiring saint such visions burn | |
| As if the gates of Paradise were thrown | |
| Wide open to receive his soul;—’t is flown: | |
| The glory vanishes, and over all | |
| Cimmerian darkness spreads her funeral pall! | 330 |
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| Morn shall return, and noon, and eve, and night | |
| Meet here with interchanging shade and light: | |
| But from this bark no timber shall decay, | |
| Of these cold forms no feature pass away; | |
| Perennial ice around the encrusted bow, | 335 |
| The peopled deck, and full-rigged masts, shall grow, | |
| Till from the sun himself the whole be hid, | |
| Or spied beneath a crystal pyramid; | |
| As in pure amber, with divergent lines, | |
| A rugged shell embossed with sea-weed shines. | 340 |
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