NO harbor of all harbors ’neath God’s sun | |
| Hath buoyed so much of all most priceless freight | |
| As this, since first a Spanish galleon | |
| Turned South from San Francisco’s golden gate. | |
| But—how they cheered from wharf and yard and deck! | 5 |
| The costliest cargo that those roads hath crost | |
| Was when to face want, famine, fever, wreck, | |
| To battle with the forces of the frost, | |
| The craft, whose light name hence shall holy be, | |
| Steered for the Northern death across that windless sea. | 10 |
| |
| O lonely headlands of th’ Alaskan strait! | |
| Ye watched that lonelier vessel as she passed; | |
| Saw ye his face grow gladly satiate | |
| Of peril as he neared the ice-fields vast? | |
| For not the salvo’s roar, the cheering town, | 15 |
| Nor Summer voyage o’er soft Pacific’s swell | |
| Delight such souls—nay, Nature’s sternest frown | |
| Sign of her fierce moods and implacable. | |
| So, where gray meeting seas the world divide | |
| With moaning wastes of chill and bitter foam, | 20 |
| Methinks his step grew lighter as he eyed | |
| The confines of his all too narrow home. | |
| Northward—the night received them, and the ice | |
| Chill shining bergs and chiller shining stars | |
| Mocked them to whom one world would not suffice | 25 |
| With toils and dangers, pestilences, wars. | |
| Northward—and East—the raving Arctic wind | |
| Stabbed at their hearts, pierced bone and marrow through, | |
| And vaster streamed the trackless tract behind, | |
| Nor nearer at their goal nor larger grew, | 30 |
| And o’er their heads strange birds of omen flew. | |
| Then—stayed and stopped—the hungry ice beneath | |
| Gnawed ravening at the vessel’s groaning sides; | |
| And shut were they in horror as a sheath, | |
| ’Twixt the thick darkness and the frozen tides. | 35 |
| And they became a memory to men | |
| Who said: “Lo! these, too, meet the ancient fate!” | |
| And weeks grew months and months grew years—and then | |
| Behold the dead raised from their lodging strait! | |
| |
| Found! But how found? One blinded, one gone mad! | 40 |
| And some are dead—the missing of the roll | |
| Doth their sepulture, awful, riteless, sad, | |
| Swell the dread trophies of the Northern pole? | |
| Answer from out Siberia’s lifeless waste, | |
| Answer from ’neath Siberia’s leaden skies, | 45 |
| Though none shall know the desperate ills they faced, | |
| Till at the crack of Doom the dead arise; | |
| Found—like a gunner lying by his gun— | |
| They found the strong Republic’s strongest son: | |
| Her eagle at his crest, her stars his shoulders on. | 50 |
| |
| O solemn service of that ancient faith! | |
| From proudest minster, darkest catacomb; | |
| From where the Asian sunshafts scorch and scathe | |
| Judean deserts—ritual of Rome, | |
| All ages have thy prayers and pæans heard, | 55 |
| But ne’er in all the measure of thy time, | |
| More faithful flock received thy weightful word | |
| From lips of holier priest—or more sublime— | |
| Than when beside the frost-sealed Lena he | |
| Read in unchanging voice thy changeless liturgy. | 60 |
| |
| O stormy splendor of the Saxon cheer, | |
| What echoes hast thou waked—of Afric night, | |
| When St. Arnaud the Legion—unto fear | |
| Most Foreign—hurled into the flaming fight; | |
| And those that roused on Alma’s blood-soaked height | 65 |
| At sunset of that red September day; | |
| And those that taught the Rhine the Scottish might; | |
| And those that beat the walls of Monterey! | |
| But the breath failing in the feeble shout | |
| That gave their envoys God-speed through the snow, | 70 |
| Despair showed vanquished, and the sinking doubt | |
| Of famine born in slow and sickening throe; | |
| Aye, showed each hero, where were heroes all | |
| Ready with Death to grip in certainty to fall! | |
| |
| Gaunt corpses in weird solitude they lie, | 75 |
| But as th’ Aurora’s signet on their sky, | |
| So on the tablets of enduring fame, | |
| Transcribed in fire the letters of each name | |
| Of those who on our streets but now we saw, | |
| Nor paled, oh, blindness, with presaging awe. | 80 |
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