COLUMBUS
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores;
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said: “Now must we pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone,
Brave Adm'r'l speak; what shall I say?”
“Why, say: ‘Sail! on! sail on! and on!’”
“My men grow mutinous day by day;
My men grow ghastly, wan and weak.”
The stout mate thought of home; a spray
Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek.
“What shall I say, brave Adm'r'l, say,
If we sight naught but seas at dawn?”
“Why, you shall say at break of day:
‘Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!’”
They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow,
Until at last the blanched mate said:
“Why, now not even God would know
Should I and all my men fall dead.
These very winds forget their way,
For God from these dread seas is gone.
Now speak, brave Adm'r'l, speak and say—”
He said: ‘Sail on! sail on! and on!’”
They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate:
“This mad sea shows his teeth tonight.
He curls his lip, he lies in wait,
He lifts his teeth, as if to bite!
Brave Adm'r'l, say but one good word:
What shall we do when hope is gone?”
The words leapt like a leaping sword:
“Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!”
Then pale and worn, he paced his deck,
And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights! And then a speck—
A light! A light! At last a light!
It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!
It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.
He gained a world; he gave that world
Its grandest lesson: “On! sail on!”
The London “Atheneum,” years after the royal reception given
my first books, pronounced this the best American poem. Let me
say to my following it is far from that; even I have done better;
too much like a chorus. “The passing of Tennyson” is better.
“The Missouri” better still. Besides, “The Missouri” has a right
to exist, as it stirred the waters from “The Shining Mountains”
to the Gulf of Mexico, and taught the nation to no longer disdain
“The Father of Waters.”
But I accept the “Atheneum's” generous praise with gratitude
and call the attention of my American doubters to the fact that
my European triumphs were not due, as they have insisted, entirely
to new scenes, for the Gates of Hercules and the Azores are as
old as the hills.
Meantime, let it be borne in mind that the Missouri, “the
great, dark water,” or “the mad, muddy water,” as some translate
it, reaches from the heart of Montana to within hail of the Cuban
seas. The Mississippi, clear as crystal from its conflux with the
somber and surging Missouri up even to its source—“Veritas Caput”
—Itasca Lake, is in every sense quite another river and entirely
of another character, in all respects. Give the Missouri his due
and we have here in the heart of the Republic, and all our own,
the noblest, if not the longest, river on the globe.
