University of Virginia Library

Now, hither, Hope, embracing thy despair;
Now hither, Faith, who through the unseen air
Dost track thy dead as living: give me light
From your deep presence; let me tell aright
The deed of her whom all men celebrate;
Who took the tokens of her husband's fate
With heart unblenching; who, though England stayed,
Stayed not her hands from seeking, but obeyed
The passionate instinct that was sure to find,
Though seeking life no more: ah, too unkind
Had been the years, nor hope of life remained:
She sought to vindicate the fame attained
By such a death, and fully to proclaim,
If it might be, his triumph and the name
Of his achievement. Welcome, was her cry,
That greater word, that life of those who die,
Fame, fame! Well knew she that he was the first
This wondrous century who had traversed
Those hidden chambers: that he lived as one
From whose firm eyes a vision has not gone,
And kept his gaze beyond the hopes and fears
Of common life, and counted out his years
By coasts explored and latitudes attained,
The new Ulysses: death at length had deigned,
She knew, to lay the crown on such a brow:
'Twas his to make, 'twas hers to prove, his vow.
Ah, lady, worthy thou of her who gave
Her banner to her hero, not to wave
O'er her last bed but o'er his triumph; then
In her first beauty died: thy voice and pen
Stirred England, knit the iron nerve which strove
To gather its own dead; and now for love
Of him and thee, behold, in three years' space
From that first pause of search, another chase
Flits o'er the waters, skirts the grinding pack,
And spends as many years upon the track
As spent the dead: well freighted for thy part,
Oh little bark, with many a lion heart;
For all had given their lives, and some had given
Large grants to speed thy way; well had she striven
For this who sent thee forth, within thy hold
Storing her faith sublime, her prayers untold.
Long time they tarried on their darksome way,
What bring they now? They have returned to-day.

They saw the northern miracles; they cleft
Heart-deep the mystery; their triumph left
Its record on the desert of the scene.

They passed to where the dead alive had been;
Probation held they nigh as long and stern
As slew the dead; therefore they bid us learn
From their own tale how suffered they who died.

They saw the sky turn o'er them, multiplied
In false horizons, japing moons and suns,
And irised zones, so fair and false at once,
So mocked the very heavens on those who died.

They saw mirage of cold, not heat: how wide
The rainbow-tinted pediments uphold
Ellora, Memphis, or Telmessus old;
So laughed the ready tomb on those who died.

They paled in monstrous night; and they did hide
The pallor of their faces from the sun:
His beams would blind them, glaring forth anon:
So did they pale, and so did shrink, who died.

They split the floes, they took the pack, defied
The toppling icebergs; sheathed in icy drift,
Themselves an iceberg, they did veer and shift
With pain in bitter change of frost and thaw;
Their patient strength the heavy sledge did draw
League after league and month by month around
The iron islet and the frozen sound:
So sailed, so ranged, so laboured they who died.

They shook with famine as they did divide
After the weary march their scanty store:
They shook with cold upon the icy floor,
Where scantly they were hutted from the blast:
Enough; behold how ere the final fast,
How ere th' eternal sleep, they shook who died.

For all was true; they could but pause beside
Those cairns, those sepulchres, which told the tale
That rumour told before; they could but quail
At sight of that grim ice-stream which had gripped,
Those grisly floes, which at the last had nipped
To death the ships; they could but trace the path
Where the lost feet had stumbled o'er the swath
Of the ribbed ice; they could but weep at thought
Of southern snow-cloud, which had gently caught
The weary ones, and wound them in its pall:
But tears and sweat are frozen ere they fall
With those who seek the dead who died so well.

The bleaching skeleton of one who fell
Beneath Cape Herschel, fallen on his face,
Lies stretched to witness that it was the grace
Of those dead mariners to win the way,
To snatch the secret from the dragon play
Of all the north; a worthy witness he
Of such an enterprise as needs must be
By death fulfilled: they saw him where he lay
In his mute witness through that monstrous day
Whose hours are months; and through that lengthened night
Whose fires avail the sky alone to light,
Not show the earth: he lay as he had died.

And so they bring their relics from the side
Of the gaunt glacier home; we hold them here:
Each shattered fragment England clasps; revere
In these the relics of the dead; behold
In these the trophies of the brave, as old
And worn they lie amid memorials proud,
With veneration be their worth allowed.
Behold them; there are things of daily need,
Exempt from use how long! No man shall read
Their pathos decent and magnanimous
With unmoved eye; and things that bear for us
A loftier import—take of all the sum;
The books of piety so worn by numb,
Dead hands that prayed; and that discoloured rag
Those hands upbore through all: 'twas England's flag.

And shall their fame be lost? The butterfly
Flitting beneath that Hyperborean sky,
Chilled by the glacial blast, shall sink and spread
Its stiffened wings upon the snow; a bed
Shall soon be scooped; life's dying warmth suffice
To dig the grave for death: anon shall rise
A little mound, that shall as truly lie
To north as any magnet, for the fly
So swayed in death his wings; the traveller
By that small grave his lonely course may steer.
Things perish not in death; a presence grows
From human deeds, which, as the wondrous rose
Of morning turns the wan and wasteful grey
In heaven to glorious warmth, and brings the day
To darksome places; as the boreal light
Flushes the chilly fields of shadeless white;
Doth so transform the realm of the unknown,
That northern waste of spirit, till 'tis grown
Full of sweet human presence, peopled widely
With memory, thought, and hope; no longer idly
Dissevered from true use: and since to all
That man attains, some failure still must fall,
Nor aught be perfect, happy let us hail
You, noble spirits, who did only fail
In death alone: hail, happy on your bier
Of snow: the spirit rises, falls the tear.