 | The various writings of Cornelius Mathews |  |
161
WAKONDAH, THE MASTER OF LIFE.
162
“We have already noticed the superstitious feelings with which the Indians regarded the Black Hills; but this immense range of mountains (the Chippewyan or Rocky Mountains) which divides all that they know of the world and gives birth to such mighty rivers, is still more an object of awe and veneration. They call it, “The Crest of the World,” and think that Wakondah or the Master of Life, as they designate the Supreme Being, has his residence among these aërial heights.”—
Astoria, Vol. I., p. 265.163
[_]
[The following stanzas are to be received as the incomplete (and, no doubt, very imperfect), fragment of a work, which opportunity and a mood, equal to what seems to the author the requirements of the subject, could alone conclude. This portion is published, with the hope that the author might feel himself, in its further progress, borne forward by something of the friendly impulse that grows from favor, and should not turn back, heart-smitten, to find that his was the only eye which dwelt with cheerful regard upon the ample look-out of its Future.]
I.
The Moon ascends the vaulted sky to-night;With a slow motion full of pomp ascends,
But mightier than the Moon that o'er it bends
A Form is dwelling on the mountain height
That boldly intercepts the struggling light—
With darkness nobler than the planet's fire:
A gloom and dreadful grandeur that aspire
To match the cheerful Heaven's far-shining might.
II.
Great God! how fearful to the gazing eye!Behold the bow that o'er his shoulder hangs,
But ah! winged with what agonies and pangs
Must arrows from its sounding bow-string fly;—
An arc of death and warfare in the sky.
He plants a spear upon the rock that clangs
Like thunder; and a blood-red token hangs,
A death-dawn, on its point aspiring high.
III.
Upon his brow a garland of the woods he wears,A crown of oak leaves broader than their wont;
Above his dark eye waves and dims its brunt—
Its feathers darker than a thousand Fears—
A cruel eagle's plume: High, high it rears,
Nor ever did the bird's rash youth surmount
A pitch of power like that o'ershadowed front
On which the plume its storm-like station bears.
IV.
Filled with the glory thus above him rolled—How would some Chinook wandering through the night
In cedern helm and elk-skin armor dight
Be pierced with blank amazement dumb and cold:
How, fear-struck, scan the Spirit's awful mould;—
The gloomy front, the death-dispelling eye,
And bulk that swallows up the sea-blue sky—
Tall as the unconcluded tower of old.
V.
Transcendant Shape! But hark, for lo a soundLike that of rivers and of mingled winds
Through forests raging 'till the tumult finds
Or makes an outlet free from hedge or bound,—
Breaks from the Holder of the mountain-ground.
Oh, listen sadly to the urgent cry!—
No mightier shadow of a strength gone by
Through the whole perishable Earth is found.
VI.
The Spirit lowers and speaks: “Tremble ye wild Woods!Ye Cataracts! your organ-voices sound!
Deep Crags, in earth by massy tenures bound,
Oh, Earthquake, level flat! The peace that broods
Above this world and steadfastly eludes
Your power, howl Winds and break;—the peace that mocks
Dismay 'mid silent streams and voiceless rocks—
Through wildernesses, cliffs and solitudes.
VII.
“Night-shadowed Rivers—lift your dusky handsAnd clap them harshly with a sullen roar!
Ye thousand Pinnacles and Steeps deplore
The glory that departs! Above you stands
Ye Lakes with azure waves and snowy strands,
A Power that utters forth his loud behest
Till mountain, lake and river shall attest
The puissance of a Master's large commands!”
VIII.
So spake the Spirit, with a wide-cast lookOf bounteous power and cheerful majesty;
As if he caught a sight of either sea
And all the subject realm between:—Then shook
His brandished arms, his stature scarce could brook,
Its confine; swelling wide, it seemed to grow
As grows a cedar on a mountain's brow
By the mad air in ruffling breezes took.
164
IX.
The woods are deaf and will not be aroused—The mountains are asleep, they hear him not,
Nor from deep-founded silence can be wrought,
Tho' herded bison on their steeps have browsed:
Beneath their banks in darksome stillness housed
The rivers loiter like a calm-bound sea;
In anchored nuptials to dumb apathy
Cliff, wilderness, and solitude, are spoused.
X.
Then shone afar Wakondah's dreadful eyes,With fire and lurid splendor, like the stars
That dazzle earth belolding them;—the wars
That noble spirits wage with enemies,
Flash in his aspect through its cloudy guise;—
His tower-high stature quakes in all its parts,
And from his brow a mighty sorrow starts—
A sorrow mightier than the midnight skies.
XI.
“Oh, wherefore tremble? Wherefore should I fearBecause these creatures now, by chance, are dumb,
Nor longer to my bidding with obeisance come;
As when, in times to startle and revere,
Templed on high within this cloudy sphere,
With wondering worship of the dusky wood—
The quivered stream, the dark-eyed solitude—
I stamped my image on the rolling year.
XII.
“At eve or morn whene'er I walked these hillsFrom ridge to ridge they shook, from peak to peak;
A thousand warrior tribes that dare not speak
Lay in my shadow with the awe that chills,
Dumb with the fear that boundless force instils.
Wakondah was a god and thunderer then,
Nor bent his bow nor launched his shafts in vain—
Lord of each power that terrifies or thrills.
XIII.
“Your dark foundations felt my framing hand;Nor can your sun-smote summits e'er forget
By whom their flood-resisting roots were set—
By whose clear skill their skyey power was planned.
Through all the borders of the lofty land—
Mountains! I call upon you to attest
Whose habitable wish upon your crest
Reared up his throne and fixed his Godhead stand.
XIV.
“My spirit stretched itself from East to West,With a winged terror or a mighty joy;
And, when his matchless bow-shafts would annoy,
I urged the dark red hunter in his quest
Of pard or panther with a gloomy zest,
And while through darkling woods they swiftly fare—
Two seeming creatures of the oak-shadowed air,
I sped the game and fired the follower's breast.
XV.
“Outsounding with my thunder thy loud vaunt,Thou, too, hast known me, mighty Cataract!—
When rocks in headlong motion thou hast tracked,
Like some huge creature goaded from his haunt,
Along the mountain passes rough and slaunt—
Who makes his foaming way while all around
He awes the circuit with a shuddering sound:—
So ragest Thou and lift'st Thy sounding front!”
XVI.
Power crumbles from the arm, and from the browGlory declines with surety swift as light:
Like towers that loose in storms their wondrous might,
Dark principalities of air must bow
And have their strength and terror smitten low:
The hour draws nigh, Wakondah, when on thine
Yon full orbed fire unpaled, shall cease to shine
Uplifted longer in Heaven's western glow!
XVII.
“Lo! where our foe up through these vales ascends,Fresh from the embraces of the swelling sea,
A glorious, white and shining Deity.
Upon our strength his deep blue eye he bends,
With threatenings full of thought and steadfast ends,
While desolation from his nostril breathes,
His glittering rage he scornfully unsheathes
And to the startled air its splendor lends.
XVIII.
“The nation-queller in their length of days—The slaughterer of the tribes art thou! the rude
Remorseless, vengeful foe of natural blood
And wood-born strength reared up amid the maze
Of forest walks and unimprisoned ways;—
The dwellers in unsteepled wastes; the host
Of warriors stark and cityless, whose boast
Was daring proof 'gainst torture that betrays.”
XIX.
Oh wrestle not, Wakondah, with the Time;The Time resistless in its present hour
Of rugged force, of multitudinous power
To make itself triumphant o'er the clime,
Where streams are endless, mountains as sublime
And valleys shadowy and calm as ever
Yet tasked a Godhead's high and bright endeavor,
Since first the world was in its mighty prime.
165
XX.
Far through the desert, see his fiery hoofSpeeds like the pale white courser of St. John,
With rage and dreadful uproar thundering on!
At every step old shadows fly aloof,
While on and on he bounds with strength enough
To master valley, hill and echoing plain—
Cheered by the outcry of a savage train
Of white-browed hunters armed in deadly proof.
XXI.
“Through the far shadows of the gathering yearsI see, visions denied to mortal eyes;
Phantoms of dreadful aspect that arise
Cold with the anguish of their wintry fears;
And struggling forth from out a gulf of tears
And blood by banded nations vainly shed,
Above them all a single Wo its head
Lifts high and awes its customary peers.
XXII.
“I say not now what name that Wo shall bear,What mournful omen on its front is written,
What pillared glories by its sad rage smitten—
Shall fall to earth, and all th' embracing air
With its dread sound of wasting tumult tear;
These are the future's—voiceless let them rest
Deep in the shadow of her silent breast,
'Till vengeance bid the sons of men—Prepare!”
XXIII.
So spake the Spirit; but I deemed I sawThat in the language of his gloomy eye,
That made a falsehood of his augury.
I know that Heaven is true to its great law;
I know how deep and damnable a flaw
Has through its righteous code of truth been rent
By erring swords and hands with blood besprent—
And this it is that fills my soul with awe.
XXIV.
And yet, oh God! I dare to ask of theePardon and palmy days for this dear land;
The glory of thy sun, thy shadowing hand,
In mercy spread abroad from sea to sea,
That all its wide vast empire so may be,
From loud Atlantic unto Oregon
An orb of power, and never to be won
Nor yielded up, a home and fortress to the free!
XXV.
“The past is past!” Wakondah spoke “the pastIs past: to others lifeless, cold and dumb
Beyond repeal, I bid it's shadows come
Swiftly before me, nor care I how vast
That which I gendered shall appear at last
As when at first it's dim colossal form,
Huge, rude, mis-shapen, noisy as a storm—
Rose up, by me called upward and amassed.
XXVI.
“Falling or rising through the azure air—Green dells that into silence stretch away;
Ye woods that counterfeit the hues of day
With colors e'en the day could not repair
From his wide fount of morning dyes and fair
Evening or noon; innumerous rampant life
With which this waste or verdant world is rife—
As yet were not; the offspring of a god-like care.
XXVII.
“Oh, backward how that youthful glory gleams—Ye creatures of my undiminished arm,
When shadowing hills were lifted like a charm,
And at a word their duly measured beams
Sprung to their chambers in the mountain seams.
This was no task-work, nor a toil of joy
Thus an immortal puissance to employ
In building worlds and pouring ocean-streams.
XXVIII.
“Oh! might and beauty of the forming earth—Shaped hy a hand upholding and divine,
For such was then Wakondah even thine!—
With hill and mountain masses bursting forth,
And struggling all along the blue-aired North—
With smiling valleys winding far between,
And rivers singing all aloud, though yet unseen:
While I, their sire, hung joyous o'er their birth.
XXIX.
“A fearful and a perilous joy was mine,When brooding thus above the seething world
I saw the striving giants swiftly hurled,
With thunderous noises to and fro; a constant line
Of furnaced lightnings, ever forced to shine
Quick, fierce and kindling through the shapeless gloom,
Made the dull void some creature disentomb,
And cheered its birth-pangs with a fire benign.
XXX.
“What voice of portent shook the gulf that heldThe uncreated majesty of woods,
The calm deep beauty of the solitudes
Of boundless fields; and from the deep compelled
That Behemoth, whose roar has lately quelled
Nations in panoply of arms arrayed?
Amid the sounding mass and undismayed
By striving rivers, shock of hills impelled
XXXI.
“'Gainst hills and wild beasts raging into light,Wakondah stood, and o'er the tumult bent,
It's Ruler and it's steadfast firmament.
He breaks the bondage of the cruel Night
That wraps them in its folds, and like a blight
Of storms that rage and thunder but to save
And purify, he burst your rock-ribbed grave—
The matchless Master of redeeming might.”—
166
XXXII.
The Spirit ceased and all along the air,From where in speechless majesty he stood—
On either hand through all the solitude
Of glittering peaks and dusky vales, to where
The wild beasts held afar their anxious lair—
A sudden silence like a tempest fell;
A silence and a gloom that none can tell—
A calm too dread for mortal things to bear.
XXXIII.
No cloud was on the moon, yet on His browA deepening shadow fell, and on his knees
That shook like tempest stricken mountain-trees,
His heavy head descended sad and low:
Like a high city smitten by the blow
That secret earthquakes strike and toppling falls
With all its arches, towers and cathedrals,
In swift and unconjectured overthrow.
XXXIV.
Thenceforth I did not see the Spirit liftAgain that night his great discrownéd head,
Nor heard a voice: He was not with the dead
Nor with the living, for the mighty gift
Of boundless power was passing like a rift
Of stormy clouds that still will have a tongue
Ere yet the winds have wafted them along
To endless silence, whitherward they drift.
THE END OF WAKONDAH.
| The various writings of Cornelius Mathews | |