The poetical works of James Montgomery :: :: University of Virginia Library

GREENLAND:

A POEM, IN FIVE CANTOS.

CANTO FIRST.

The first three Moravian Missionaries are represented as on their Voyage to Greenland, in the Year 1733. Sketch of the Descent, Establishment, Persecutions, Extinction, and Revival of the Church of the United Brethren from the Tenth to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century. The Origin of their Missions to the West Indies and to Greenland.

The moon is watching in the sky; the stars
Are swiftly wheeling on their golden cars;
Ocean, outstretch'd with infinite expanse,
Serenely slumbers in a glorious trance;
The tide, o'er which no troubling spirits breathe,
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:
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.

Hark! through the calm and silence of the scene,
Slow, solemn, sweet, with many a pause between,
Celestial music swells along the air!
—No!—'tis the evening hymn of praise and prayer
From yonder deck; where, on the stern retired,
Three humble voyagers, with looks inspired,
And hearts enkindled with a holier flame
Than ever lit to empire or to fame,
Devoutly stand:—their choral accents rise
On wings of harmony beyond the skies;
And, 'midst the songs that Seraph-Minstrels sing,
Day without night, to their immortal King,
These simple strains,—which erst Bohemian hills
Echo'd to pathless woods and desert rills,
Now heard from Shetland's azure bound,—are known
In heaven; and He, who sits upon the throne
In human form, with mediatorial power,
Remembers Calvary, and hails the hour
When, by the Almighty Father's high decree,
The utmost north to Him shall bow the knee,
And, won by love, an untamed rebel-race
Kiss the victorious Sceptre of His grace.
Then to His eye, whose instant glance pervades
Heaven's heights, Earth's circle, Hell's profoundest shades,
Is there a group more lovely than those three
Night-watching Pilgrims on the lonely sea?
Or to His ear, that gathers in one sound
The voices of adoring worlds around,
Comes there a breath of more delightful praise
Than the faint notes his poor disciples raise,
Ere on the treacherous main they sink to rest,
Secure as leaning on their Master's breast?

They sleep: but memory wakes; and dreams array
Night in a lively masquerade of day.
The land they seek, the land they leave behind,
Meet on mid-ocean in the plastic mind:
One brings forsaken home and friends so nigh,
That tears in slumber swell the' unconscious eye;
The other opens, with prophetic view,
Perils, which e'en their fathers never knew,
(Though school'd by suffering, long inured to toil,
Outcasts and exiles from their natal soil;)
—Strange scenes, strange men; untold, untried distress;
Pain, hardships, famine, cold, and nakedness,
Diseases; death in every hideous form,
On shore, at sea, by fire, by flood, by storm;
Wild beasts and wilder men;—unmoved with fear,
Health, comfort, safety, life, they count not dear,
May they but hope a Saviour's love to show,
And warn one spirit from eternal woe:
Nor will they faint; nor can they strive in vain,
Since thus—to live is Christ, to die is gain.

'Tis morn:—the bathing moon her lustre shrouds;
Wide o'er the east impends an arch of clouds,
That spans the ocean;—while the infant dawn
Peeps through the portal o'er the liquid lawn,
That ruffled by an April gale appears,
Between the gloom and splendour of the spheres,
Dark-purple as the moorland-heath, when rain
Hangs in low vapours o'er the autumnal plain:
Till the full Sun, resurgent from the flood,
Looks on the waves, and turns them into blood;
But quickly kindling, as his beams aspire,
The lambent billows play in forms of fire.
—Where is the Vessel?—Shining through the light,
Like the white sea-fowl's horizontal flight,
Yonder she wings, and skims, and cleaves her way
Through refluent foam and iridescent spray.

Lo! on the deck with patriarchal grace,
Heaven in his bosom opening o'er his face,
Stands Christian David;—venerable name!
Bright in the records of celestial fame,
On earth obscure;—like some sequester'd star,
That rolls in its Creator's beams afar,
Unseen by man; till telescopic eye,
Sounding the blue abysses of the sky,
Draws forth its hidden beauty into light,
And adds a jewel to the crown of night.
Though hoary with the multitude of years,
Unshorn of strength, between his young compeers
He towers;—with faith, whose boundless glance can see
Time's shadows brightening through eternity;
Love—God's own love in his pure breast enshrined;
Love—love to man the magnet of his mind;
Sublimer schemes maturing in his thought
Than ever statesman plann'd or warrior wrought:
While, with rejoicing tears, and rapturous sighs,
To heaven ascends their morning sacrifice.

Whence are the pilgrims? whither would they roam?
Greenland their port;—Moravia was their home.
Sprung from a race of martyrs; men who bore
The cross on many a Golgotha of yore;
When first Sclavonian tribes the truth received,
And princes, at the price of thrones, believed;
—When Waldo, flying from the' apostate west,
In German wilds his righteous cause confess'd;
—When Wickliffe, like a rescuing Angel, found
The dungeon where the Word of God lay bound,
Unloosed its chains, and led it by the hand,
In its own sunshine, through his native land:

—When Huss, the victim of perfidious foes,
To heaven upon a fiery chariot rose;
And, ere he vanish'd, with a prophet's breath
Foretold the' immortal triumphs of his death:
—When Ziska, burning with fanatic zeal,
Exchanged the Spirit's sword for patriot steel,
And through the heart of Austria's thick array
To Tabor's summit stabb'd resistless way;
But there (as if transfigured on the spot
The world's Redeemer stood) his rage forgot;
Deposed his arms and trophies in the dust,
Wept like a babe, and placed in God his trust,
While prostrate warriors kiss'd the hallow'd ground,
And lay, like slain, in silent ranks around:
—When mild Gregorius, in a lowlier field,
As brave a witness, as unwont to yield,
As Ziska's self, with patient footsteps trod
A path of suffering, like the Son of God,
And nobler palms, by meek endurance won,
Than if his sword had blazed from sun to sun:
Though nature fail'd him on the racking wheel,
He felt the joys which parted spirits feel;
Rapt into bliss from ecstasy of pain,
Imagination wander'd o'er a plain:
Fair in the midst, beneath a morning sky,
A tree its ample branches bore on high,
With fragrant bloom, and fruit delicious hung,
While birds beneath the foliage fed and sung;
All glittering to the sun with diamond dew,
O'er sheep and kine a breezy shade it threw;
A lovely boy, the child of hope and prayer,
With crook and shepherd's pipe, was watching there;
At hand three venerable forms were seen,
In simple garb, with apostolic mien,
Who mark'd the distant fields convulsed with strife,
—The guardian Cherubs of that Tree of Life;
Not arm'd, like Eden's host, with flaming brands,
Alike to friends and foes they stretch their hands
In sign of peace, and, while Destruction spread
His path with carnage, welcomed all who fled:
—When poor Comenius, with his little flock,
Escaped the wolves, and, from the boundary rock,
Cast o'er Moravian hills a look of woe,
Saw the green vales expand, the waters flow,
And happier years revolving in his mind,
Caught every sound that murmur'd on the wind;
As if his eye could never thence depart,
As if his ear were seated in his heart,

And his full soul would thence a passage break,
To leave the body, for his country's sake;
While on his knees he pour'd the fervent prayer,
That God would make that martyr-land His care,
And nourish in its ravaged soil a root
Of Gregor's Tree, to bear perennial fruit.

His prayer was heard:—that Church, through ages past,
Assail'd and rent by persecution's blast;
Whose sons no yoke could crush, no burden tire,
Unawed by dungeons, tortures, sword, and fire,
(Less proof against the world's alluring wiles,
Whose frowns have weaker terrors than its smiles;)
—That Church, o'erthrown, dispersed, unpeopled, dead,
Oft from the dust of ruin raised her head,
And rallying round her feet, as from their graves,
Her exiled orphans, hid in forest-caves;
Where, 'midst the fastnesses of rocks and glens,
Banded like robbers, stealing from their dens,
By night they met, their holiest vows to pay,
As if their deeds were dark, and shunn'd the day;
While Christ's revilers, in his seamless robe,
And parted garments, flaunted round the globe;
From east to west while priestcraft's banners flew,
And harness'd kings his iron chariot drew:
—That Church advanced triumphant, o'er the ground
Where all her conquering martyrs had been crown'd,
Fearless her foe's whole malice to defy,
And worship God in liberty,—or die:
For truth and conscience, oft she pour'd her blood,
And firmest in the fiercest conflicts stood,
Wresting from bigotry the proud control
Claim'd o'er the sacred empire of the soul,
Where God, the Judge of all, should fill the throne,
And reign, as in his universe, alone.

'Twas thus through centuries she rose and fell;
At length victorious seem'd the gates of hell;
But founded on a rock, which cannot move—
The' eternal rock of her Redeemer's love—
That Church, which Satan's legions thought destroy'd,
Her name extinct, her place for ever void,
Alive once more, respired her native air,
But found no freedom for the voice of prayer:
Again the cowl'd oppressor clank'd his chains,
Flourish'd his scourge, and threaten'd bonds and pains,
(His arm enfeebled could no longer kill,
But in his heart he was a murderer still:)
Then Christian David, strengthen'd from above,
Wise as the serpent, harmless as the dove;
Bold as a lion on his Master's part,
In zeal a seraph, and a child in heart;
Pluck'd from the gripe of antiquated laws,
(Even as a mother from the felon jaws
Of a lean wolf, that bears her babe away,
With courage beyond nature, rends the prey,)
The little remnant of that ancient race:
—Far in Lusatian woods they found a place;
There—where the sparrow builds her busy nest,
And the clime-changing swallow loves to rest,
Thine altar, God of Hosts!—there still appear
The tribes to worship, unassail'd by fear;
Not like their fathers, vex'd from age to age
By blatant Bigotry's insensate rage,
Abroad in every place,—in every hour
Awake, alert, and ramping to devour.
No; peaceful as the spot where Jacob slept,
And guard all night the journeying angels kept,
Herrnhut yet stands amidst her shelter'd bowers;
—The Lord hath set his watch upon her towers.

Soon, homes of humble form, and structure rude,
Raised sweet society in solitude:
And the lorn traveller there, at fall of night,
Could trace from distant hills the spangled light
Which now from many a cottage window stream'd,
Or in full glory round the chapel beam'd;
While hymning voices, in the silent shade,
Music of all his soul's affections made;
Where through the trackless wilderness, erewhile,
No hospitable ray was known to smile,—
Or if a sudden splendour kindled joy,
'Twas but a meteor dazzling to destroy:
While the wood echoed to the hollow owl,
The fox's cry, or wolf's lugubrious howl.

Unwearied as the camel, day by day,
Tracks through unwater'd wilds his doleful way,
Yet in his breast a cherish'd draught retains,
To cool the fervid current in his veins,
While from the sun's meridian realms he brings
The gold and gems of Ethiopian kings:
So Christian David, spending yet unspent,
On many a pilgrimage of mercy went;
Through all their haunts his suffering brethren sought,
And safely to that land of promise brought;
While in his bosom, on the toilsome road,
A secret well of consolation flow'd,
Fed from the fountain near the' eternal throne,
—Bliss to the world unyielded and unknown.

In stillness thus the little Zion rose:
But scarcely found those fugitives repose,
Ere to the west with pitying eyes they turn'd;
Their love to Christ beyond the' Atlantic burn'd.
Forth sped their messengers, content to be
Captives themselves, to cheer captivity;
Soothe the poor Negro with fraternal smiles,
And preach deliverance in those prison-isles
Where man's most hateful forms of being meet,
—The tyrant, and the slave that licks his feet.

O'er Greenland next two youths in secret wept:
And where the sabbath of the dead was kept,
With pious forethought, while their hands prepare
Beds which the living and unborn shall share,
(For man so surely to the dust is brought,
His grave before his cradle may be wrought,)
They told their purpose, each o'erjoy'd to find
His own idea in his brother's mind.
For counsel in simplicity they pray'd,
And vows of ardent consecration made:
—Vows heard in heaven; from that accepted hour,
Their souls were clothed with confidence and power,
Nor hope deferr'd could quell their hearts' desire;
The bush once kindled grew amidst the fire:
But ere its shoots a tree of life became,
Congenial spirits caught the' electric flame;
And for that holy service, young and old
Their plighted faith and willing names enroll'd;
Eager to change the rest, so lately found,
For life-long labours on barbarian ground;
To break, through barriers of eternal ice,
A vista to the gates of Paradise,
And light beneath the shadow of the pole
The tenfold darkness of the human soul:
To man,—a task more hopeless than to bless
With Indian fruits that arctic wilderness;
With God,—as possible when unbegun
As though the destined miracle were done.

Three chosen candidates at length went forth,
Heralds of mercy to the frozen north;
Like mariners with seal'd instructions sent,
They went in faith, (as childless Abram went
To dwell, by sufferance, in a land decreed
The future birthright of his promised seed,)

Unknowing whither;—uninquiring why
Their lot was cast beneath so strange a sky,
Where cloud nor star appear'd, to mortal sense
Pointing the hidden path of Providence,
And all around was darkness to be felt;
—Yet in that darkness light eternal dwelt:
They knew—and 'twas enough for them to know—
The still small voice that whisper'd them to go;
For He, who spake by that mysterious voice,
Inspired their will, and made His call their choice.

See the swift vessel, bounding o'er the tide,
That wafts, with Christian David for their guide,
Two young Apostles on their joyful way
To regions in the twilight verge of day:
Freely they quit the clime that gave them birth,
Home, kindred, friendship, all they loved on earth;
What things were gain before, accounting loss,
And, glorying in the shame, they bear the cross;
—Not as the Spaniard, on his flag unfurl'd,
A bloody omen through a Pagan world;
—Not the vain image, which the Devotee
Clasps as the God of his idolatry;—
But in their hearts, to Greenland's western shore,
That dear memorial of their Lord they bore;
Amidst the wilderness to lift the sign
Of wrath appeased by Sacrifice Divine;
And bid a serpent-stung and dying race
Look on their Healer, and be saved by grace.

CANTO SECOND.

Hopes and Fears. The Brethren pursue their Voyage. A Digression on Iceland.

What are thine hopes, Humanity!—thy fears,
Poor voyager, upon this flood of years,
Whose tide, unturning, hurries to the sea
Of dark unsearchable eternity,
The fragile skiffs, in which thy children sail
A day, an hour, a moment, with the gale,
Then vanish;—gone like eagles on the wind,
Or fish in waves, that yield and close behind?
Thine Hopes,—lost anchors buried in the deep,
That rust, through storm and calm, in iron sleep;
Whose cables, loose aloft and fix'd below,
Rot with the sea-weed, floating to and fro!
Thy Fears—are wrecks that strew the fatal surge,
Whose whirlpools swallow, or whose currents urge,
Adventurous barks on rocks, that lurk at rest,
Where the blue halcyon builds her foam-light nest;
Or strand them on illumined shoals, that gleam
Like drifted gold in summer's cloudless beam:
Thus would thy race, beneath their parent's eye,
Live without knowledge, without prospect die.

But when Religion bids her spirit breathe,
And opens bliss above and woe beneath;
When God reveals his march through Nature's night,
His steps are beauty, and his presence light,
His voice is life:—the dead in conscience start;
They feel a new creation in the heart.
Ah! then, Humanity, thy hopes, thy fears,
How changed, how wondrous!—On this tide of years,
Though the frail barks, in which thine offspring sail
Their day, their hour, their moment with the gale,
Must perish;—shipwreck only sets them free;
With joys unmeasured as eternity,
They ply on seas of glass their golden oars,
And pluck immortal fruits along the shores;
Nor shall their cables fail, their anchors rust,
Who wait the resurrection of the just:
Moor'd on the Rock of Ages, though decay
Moulder the weak terrestrial frame away,
The trumpet sounds,—and lo! wherever spread,
Earth, air, and ocean render back their dead;
And souls with bodies, spiritual and divine,
In the new heavens, like stars, for ever shine.
These are thine Hopes:—thy Fears what tongue can tell?
Behold them graven on the gates of Hell:
“The wrath of God abideth here: his breath
Kindled the flames:—this is the second death.”
'Twas Mercy wrote the lines of judgment there;
None who from earth can read them may despair!
Man!—let the warning strike presumption dumb;—
Awake! arise! escape the wrath to come!
No resurrection from that grave shall be;
The worm within, is—immortality.

The terrors of Jehovah, and his grace,
The Brethren bear to earth's remotest race.
And now, exulting on their swift career,
The northern waters narrowing in the rear,
They rise upon the' Atlantic flood, that rolls
Shoreless and fathomless between the poles,
Whose waves the east and western world divide,
Then gird the globe with one circumfluent tide;

For mighty Ocean, by whatever name
Known to vain man, is every where the same,
And deems all regions by his gulfs embraced
But vassal tenures of his sovereign waste.
Clear shines the sun; the surge, intensely blue,
Assumes by day heaven's own aërial hue:
Buoyant and beautiful, as through a sky,
On balanced wings, behold the vessel fly;
Invisibly impell'd, as though it felt
A soul, within its heart of oak that dwelt,
Which broke the billows with spontaneous force,
Ruled the free elements, and chose its course.
Not so:—and yet, along the trackless realm,
A hand unseen directs the' unconscious helm;
The Power that sojourn'd in the cloud by day,
And fire by night, on Israel's desert way;
That Power the obedient vessel owns:—His will,
Tempest and calm, and death and life, fulfil.

Day following day the current smoothly flows;
Labour is but refreshment from repose;
Perils are vanish'd; every fear resign'd;
Peace walks the waves, Hope carols on the wind;
And Time so sweetly travels o'er the deep,
They feel his motion like the fall of sleep
On weary limbs, that, stretch'd in stillness, seem
To float upon the eddy of a stream,
Then sink,—to wake in some transporting dream.
Thus, while the Brethren far in exile roam,
Visions of Greenland show their future home.
—Now a dark speck, but brightening as it flies,
A vagrant sea-fowl glads their eager eyes;
How lovely from the narrow deck to see
The meanest link of nature's family,
Which makes us feel, in dreariest solitude,
Affinity with all that breathe renew'd:
At once a thousand kind emotions start,
And the blood warms and mantles round the heart!
—O'er the ship's lee, the waves, in shadow seen,
Change from deep indigo to beryl green,
And wreaths of frequent weed, that slowly float,
Land to the watchful mariner denote:
Ere long the pulse beats quicker through his breast,
When, like a range of evening clouds at rest,
Iceland's gray cliffs and ragged coast he sees,
But shuns them, leaning on the southern breeze;
And, while they vanish far in distance, tells
Of lakes of fire and necromancers' spells.

Strange Isle! a moment to poetic gaze
Rise in thy majesty of rocks and bays,
Glens, fountains, caves that seem not things of earth,
But the wild shapes of some prodigious birth;
As if the kraken monarch of the sea,
Wallowing abroad in his immensity,
By polar storms and lightning shafts assail'd,
Wedged with ice-mountains, here had fought and fail'd;
Perish'd—and, in the petrifying blast,
His hulk became an island rooted fast;
—Rather, from Ocean's dark foundation hurl'd,
Thou art a type of his mysterious world,
Buoy'd on the desolate abyss, to show
What wonders of creation hide below.

Here Hecla's triple peaks, with meteor lights,
Nature's own beacons, cheer hybernal nights:
But when the orient flames in red array,
Like ghosts the spectral splendours flee the day;
Morn at her feet beholds supinely spread
The carcass of the old Chimera dead,
That wont to vomit flames and molten ore,
Now cleft asunder to the inmost core;
In smouldering heaps, wide wrecks and cinders strown,
Lie like the walls of Sodom overthrown,
(Ere from the face of blushing Nature swept,
And where the city stood the Dead Sea slept;)
While inaccessible, tradition feigns,
To human foot the guarded top remains,

Where birds of hideous shape and doleful note,
Fate's ministers, in livid vapours float.

Far off, amidst the placid sunshine, glow
Mountains with hearts of fire and crests of snow,
Whose blacken'd slopes with deep ravines entrench'd,
Their thunders silenced, and their lightnings quench'd,
Still the slow heat of spent eruptions breathe,
While embyro earthquakes swell their wombs beneath.

Hark! from yon caldron cave, the battle-sound
Of fire and water warring under ground:
Rack'd on the wheels of an ebullient tide,
Here might some spirit, fall'n from bliss, abide,—
Such fitful wailings of intense despair,
Such emanating splendours, fill the air.
—He comes, he comes; the' infuriate Geyser springs
Up to the firmament on vapoury wings;
With breathless awe the mounting glory view;
White whirling clouds his steep ascent pursue.
But lo! a glimpse;—refulgent to the gale,
He starts all naked through his riven veil;
A fountain-column, terrible and bright,
A living, breathing, moving form of light:
From central earth to heaven's meridian thrown,
The mighty apparition towers alone,
Rising, as though for ever he could rise,
Storm and resume his palace in the skies,
All foam, and turbulence, and wrath below;
Around him beams the reconciling bow;
(Signal of peace, whose radiant girdle binds,
Till nature's doom, the waters and the winds;)
While mist and spray, condensed to sudden dews,
The air illumine with celestial hues,
As if the bounteous sun were raining down
The richest gems of his imperial crown.
In vain the spirit wrestles to break free,
Foot-bound to fathomless captivity;
A power unseen, by sympathetic spell
For ever working, to his flinty cell
Recalls him from the ramparts of the spheres:
He yields, collapses, lessens, disappears;
Darkness receives him in her vague abyss,
Around whose verge light froth and bubbles hiss,
While the low murmurs of the refluent tide
Far into subterranean silence glide,
The eye still gazing down the dread profound,
When the bent ear hath wholly lost the sound.
—But is he slain and sepulchred?—Again
The deathless giant sallies from his den,
Scales with recruited strength the ethereal walls,
Struggles afresh for liberty—and falls.
Yes, and for liberty the fight renew'd,
By day, by night, undaunted, unsubdued,
He shall maintain, till Iceland's solid base
Fail, and the mountains vanish from its face.

And can these fail?—Of Alpine height and mould
Schapta's unshaken battlements behold;
His throne an hundred hills; his sun-crown'd head
Resting on clouds; his robe of shadow spread
O'er half the isle; he pours from either hand
An unexhausted river through the land,
On whose fair banks, through valleys warm and green,
Cattle and flocks, and homes, and spires are seen.
Here Nature's earthquake-pangs were never felt;
Here in repose hath man for ages dwelt:
The everlasting mountain seems to say,
“I am,—and I shall never pass away.”

Yet fifty winters, and, with huge uproar,
Thy pride shall perish;—thou shalt be no more!
Amidst chaotic ruins on the plain,
Those cliffs, these waters, shall be sought in vain!
—Through the dim vista of unfolding years,
A pageant of portentous woe appears.

Yon rosy groups, with golden locks, at play,
I see them,—few, decrepit, silent, gray;
Their fathers all at rest beneath the sod,
Whose flowerless verdure marks the House of God,
Home of the living and the dead;—where meet
Kindred and strangers, in communion sweet,
When dawns the Sabbath on the block-built pile;
The kiss of peace, the welcome, and the smile
Go round; till comes the Priest, a father there,
And the bell knolls his family to prayer:
Angels might stoop from thrones in heaven, to be
Co-worshippers in such a family,
Whom from their nooks and dells, where'er they roam,
The Sabbath gathers to their common home.
Oh! I would stand a keeper at this gate
Rather than reign with kings in guilty state;
A day in such serene enjoyment spent
Were worth an age of splendid discontent!
—But whither am I hurried from my theme?
Schapta returns on the prophetic dream.

From eve till morn strange meteors streak the pole;
At cloudless noon mysterious thunders roll,
As if below both shore and ocean hurl'd
From deep convulsions of the nether world:
Anon the river, boiling from its bed,
Shall leap its bounds and o'er the lowlands spread,
Then waste in exhalation,—leaving void
As its own channel, utterly destroy'd,
Fields, gardens, dwellings, churches, and their graves,
All wreck'd or disappearing with the waves.
The fugitives that 'scape this instant death
Inhale slow pestilence with every breath;
Mephitic steams from Schapta's mouldering breast
With livid horror shall the air infest;
And day shall glare so foully on the sight,
Darkness were refuge from the curse of light.
Lo! far among the glaciers, wrapt in gloom,
The red precursors of approaching doom,
Scatter'd and solitary founts of fire,
Unlock'd by hands invisible, aspire:
Ere long, more rapidly than eye can count,
Above, beneath, they multiply, they mount,
Converge, condense,—a crimson phalanx form,
And rage aloft in one unbounded storm;
From heaven's red roof the fierce reflections throw
A sea of fluctuating light below.
—Now the whole army of destroyers, fleet
As whirlwinds, terrible as lightnings, meet;
The mountains melt like wax along their course,
When, downward pouring with resistless force
Through the void channel where the river roll'd,
To ocean's verge their flaming march they hold;
While blocks of ice, and crags of granite rent,
Half-fluid ore, and rugged minerals blent,
Float on the gulf, till molten or immersed,
Or in explosive thunderbolts dispersed.
Thus shall the Schapta, towering on the brink
Of unknown jeopardy, in ruin sink;
And, this wild paroxysm of frenzy past,
At her own work shall Nature stand aghast.

Look on this desolation:—mark yon brow,
Once adamant, a cone of ashes now:
Here rivers swampt; there valleys levell'd, plains
O'erwhelm'd;—one black-red wilderness remains,
One crust of lava, through whose cinder-heat
The pulse of buried streams is felt to beat;
These from the frequent fissures, eddying white,
Sublimed to vapour, issue forth like light
Amidst the sulphury fumes, that, drear and dun,
Poison the atmosphere and blind the sun.
Above, as if the sky had felt the stroke
Of that volcano, and consumed to smoke,
One cloud appears in heaven, and one alone,
Hung round the dark horizon's craggy zone,
Forming at once the vast encircling wall,
And the dense roof, of some Tartarean hall,
Propt by a thousand pillars, huge and strange,
Fantastic forms that every moment change,
As, hissing, surging from the floor beneath,
Volumes of steam the' imprison'd waters breathe.
Then, should the sun, ere evening gloom ascend,
Quick from the west the murky curtain rend,
And pour the beauty of his beams between
These hideous arches, and light up the scene;
At the sweet touch of his transforming rays,
With amber lustre all the columns blaze,
And the thick folds of cumbrous fog aloof
Change to rich drapery of celestial woof:
With such enchantment air and earth were fraught,
Beyond the colouring of the wealthiest thought
That Iceland scalds, transported at the view,
Might deem the legends of their fathers true,
And here behold, illumining the waste,
The palace of immortal Odin placed;

Till rapt Imagination joy'd to hear
The neigh of steeds, the clank of armour near,
And saw, in barbarous state, the tables spread
With shadowy food, and compass'd with the dead,
Weary from conflicts,—still the fierce delight
Of spectre-warriors, in the daily fight:
Then while they quaff'd the mead from skulls of foes,
By whirlwind gusts the din of battle rose;
The strife of tongues, the tournament of words,
Following the shock of shields, the clash of swords;
Till, gorged and drunken at the' enormous feast,
Awhile their revels and their clamours ceased;
Ceased to the eye and ear;—yet where they lay,
Like sleeping lions, surfeited with prey,
In tawny groups, recumbent through the den,
In dreams the heroes drank and fought again.

Away with such Divinities! their birth
Man's brain-sick superstition, and their mirth
Lust, rapine, cruelty;—their fell employ
God's works and their own votaries to destroy.
—The Runic Bard to nobler themes shall string
His ancient harp, and mightier triumphs sing;
For glorious days are risen on Iceland:—clear
The Gospel-trumpet sounds to every ear,
And deep in many a heart the Spirit's voice
Bids the believing soul in hope rejoice.
O'er the stern face of this tempestuous isle,
Though briefly Spring, and Autumn never, smile,
Truth walks with naked foot the unyielding snows,
And the glad desert blossoms like the rose.
Though earthquakes heave, though torrents drown, his cot,
Volcanoes waste his fields,—the peasant's lot
Is blest beyond the destiny of kings:
—Lifting his eyes above sublunar things,
Like dying Stephen, when he saw in prayer
Heaven open'd, and his Saviour beckoning there,
He cries, and clasps his Bible to his breast,
“Let the earth perish,—here is not my rest.”

CANTO THIRD.

The Voyage to Greenland concluded. A Fog at Sea. Ice-Fields. Eclipse of the Sun. The Greenland Fable of Malina and Aninga. A Storm. The Ice-Blink. Northern Lights. The Brethren land.

How speed the faithful witnesses, who bore
The Bible and its hopes to Greenland's shore?
—Like Noah's ark, alone upon the wave,
(Of one lost world the' immeasurable grave,)
Yonder the ship, a solitary speck,
Comes bounding from the horizon; while on deck
Again Imagination rests her wing,
And smooths her pinions, while the Pilgrims sing
Their vesper oraisons. The Sun retires,—
Not as he wont, with clear and golden fires;
Bewilder'd in a labyrinth of haze,
His orb redoubled, with discolour'd rays,
Struggles and vanishes;—along the deep,
With slow array, expanding vapours creep,
Whose folds, in twilight's yellow glare uncurl'd,
Present the dreams of an unreal world;
Islands in air suspended; marching ghosts
Of armies, shapes of castles, winding coasts,
Navies at anchor, mountains, woods, and streams,
Where all is strange, and nothing what it seems;
Till deep-involving gloom, without a spark
Of star, moon, meteor, desolately dark,
Seals up the vision:—then, the pilot's fears
Slacken his arm; a doubtful course he steers,
Till morning comes, but comes not clad in light;
Uprisen day is but a paler night,
Revealing not a glimpse of sea or sky;
The ship's circumference bounds the sailor's eye.
So cold and dense the' impervious fog extends,
He might have touch'd the point where being ends;
His bark is all the universe; so void
The scene,—as though creation were destroy'd,
And he and his few mates, of all their race,
Were here becalm'd in everlasting space.

Silent and motionless, above, below,
The sails all struck, the waves unheard to flow,
In this drear blank of utter solitude,
Where life stands still, no faithless fears intrude;
Through that impervious veil the Brethren see
The face of omnipresent Deity:
Nor Him alone;—whate'er His hand hath made;
His glory in the firmament display'd;
The sun, majestic in his course, and sole;
The moon and stars, rejoicing round the pole;
Earth, o'er its peopled realms and wastes unknown,
Clad in the wealth of every varying zone;
Ocean, through all the' enchantment of his forms,
From breathing calms to devastating storms;
Heaven, in the vision of eternal bliss;
Death's terrors, hell's unsearchable abyss;
—Though rapt in secrecy from human eye,
These in the mind's profound sensorium lie,
And, with their Maker, by a glance of thought,
Are in a moment to remembrance brought;
Then most, when most restrain'd the' imperfect sight,
God and His works shine forth in His own light.
Yet clearest through that veil the Pilgrims trace
Their Father's image in their Saviour's face;
A sigh can waft them to His feet in prayer,
Not Gabriel bends with more acceptance there,
Nor to the throne from heaven's pure altar rise
The odours of a sweeter sacrifice,
Than when before the mercy-seat they kneel,
And tell Him all they fear, or hope, or feel;
Perils without, and enemies within,
Satan, the world, temptation, weakness, sin;
Yet rest unshaken on his sure defence,
Invincible through his omnipotence:
“Oh! step by step,” they cry, “direct our way,
And give Thy grace, like manna, day by day;
The store of yesterday will not suffice,
To-morrow's sun to us may never rise:
Safe only, when our souls are stay'd on Thee;
Rich only, when we know our poverty.”

And step by step the Lord those suppliants led;
He gave them daily grace like daily bread;
By sea, on shore, through all their pilgrimage,
In rest and labour, to their latest age,
Sharp though their trials, and their comforts scant,
God was their refuge, and they knew not want.

On rustling pinions, like an unseen bird,
Among the yards a stirring breeze is heard:
The conscious vessel wakes as from a trance.
Her colours float, the filling sails advance;
White from her prow the murmuring surge recedes:
—So the swan, startled from her nest of reeds,
Swells into beauty, and, with curving chest,
Cleaves the blue lake, with motion soft as rest.
Light o'er the liquid lawn the pageant glides;
Her helm the well-experienced pilot guides,
And, while he threads the mist-enveloped maze,
Turns to the magnet his inquiring gaze,
In whose mute oracle, where'er he steers,
The pointing hand of Providence appears;
With this, though months of gloom the main enrobe,
His keel might plough a furrow round the globe.

Again the night ascends without a star:
Low sounds come booming o'er the waves afar,

As if conflicting navies shook the flood,
With human thunders in the strife of blood,
That slay more victims in one brief campaign
Than heaven's own bolts through centuries have slain.
The seaman hearkens;—colour flies his cheek,
His stout heart throbs with fears he dare not speak.
No lightning-splendours streak the' unbroken gloom;
—His bark may shoot the gulf beyond the tomb,
And he, if e'er it come, may meet a light
Which never yet hath dawn'd on living sight.
Fresher and fresher blows the' insurgent gale;
He reefs his tops, he narrows sail by sail,
Yet feels the ship with swifter impulse sweep
O'er mightier billows, the recoiling deep;
While still, with doleful omen on his ear,
Come the deaf echoes of those sounds of fear,
Distant,—yet every volley rolls more near.

Oh! in that agony of thought forlorn,
How longs the impatient mariner for morn!
She wakes,—his eyes are wither'd to behold
The scene which her disastrous beams unfold:
The fog is vanish'd, but the welkin lowers,
Sharp hail descends, and sleet in blinding showers;
Ocean one bed of foam, with fury tost,
In undistinguishable whiteness lost,
Save where vast fields of ice their surface show,
Buoyant, but many a fathom sunk below:
Changing his station as the fragments pass,
Death stands the pilot of each ponderous mass;
Gathering his brow into the darkest frown,
He bolts his raft to run the victim down,
But shoots astern:—the shock the vessel feels,
A moment in the giddy whirlpool reels,
Then like an arrow soars, as through the air,
So high the salient waves their burden bear.

Quick skirmishes with floating batteries past,
Ruin inevitable threats at last:
Athwart the north, like ships of battle spread,
Winter's flotilla, by their captain led,
(Who boasts with these to make his prowess known,
And plant his foot beyond the arctic zone,)
Islands of ice, so wedged and grappled lie,
One moving continent appals the eye,
And to the ear renews those notes of doom
That brought portentous warnings through the gloom;
For loud and louder, with explosive shocks,
Sudden convulsions split the frost-bound rocks,
And launch loose mountains on the frothing ooze,
As pirate-barks, on summer seas to cruise.
In front this perilous array;—behind,
Borne on the surges, driven by the wind,
The vessel hurries to the brink of fate;
All efforts fail,—but prayer is not too late:
Then, in the imminent and ghastly fall
Foul on destruction, the disciples call
On Him, their Master, who, in human form,
Slept in the lap of the devouring storm;
On Him, who in the midnight watch was seen,
Walking the gulf, ineffably serene,
At whose rebuke the tempest ceased to roar,
The winds caress'd the waves, the waves the shore:
On Him they call;—their prayer, in faith preferr'd
Amidst the frantic hurricane, is heard;
He gives the sign, by none in earth or heaven
Known, but by him to whom the charge is given,
The Angel of the Waters;—he, whose wrath
Had hurl'd the vessel on that shipwreck path,
Becomes a minister of grace;—his breath
Blows,—and the enemies are scatter'd,—Death,
Reft of his quarry, plunges through the wave,
Buried himself where he had mark'd their grave.
The line of battle broken, and the chain
Of that armada, which oppress'd the main,
Snapt hopelessly asunder, quickly all
The' enormous masses in disruption fall,
And the weak vessel, through the chaos wild,
Led by the mighty Angel,—as a child,
Snatch'd from its crib, and in the mother's arms
Borne through a midnight tumult of alarms,—
Escapes the wrecks; nor slackens her career
Till sink the forms, and cease the sounds, of fear,
And He, who rules the universe at will,
Saith to the reinless elements, “Be still.”

Then rise sweet hymns of gratulation; praise
From hearts and voices, in harmonious lays;—
So Israel sang deliverance, when he stood
By the Red Sea, and saw the morning-flood,
That in its terrible embraces bore
The slain pursuers and their spoils on shore.

Light-breathing gales awhile their course propel,
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 pass'd
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,
From icy cliffs refracted splendours play,
And clouds of sea-fowl high in ether sweep,
Or fall like stars through sunshine on the deep.
'Tis Greenland! but so desolately bare,
Amphibious life alone inhabits there;
'Tis Greenland! yet so beautiful the sight,
The Brethren gaze with undisturb'd 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
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.

Their faith must yet be tried:—the sun at noon
Shrinks from the shadow of the passing moon,
Till, ray by ray of all his pomp bereft
(Save one slight ring of quivering lustre left),
Total eclipse involves his peerless eye:
Portentous twilight creeps around the sky;
The frighted sea-birds to their haunts repair;
There is a freezing stillness in the air,
As if the blood through Nature's veins ran cold,
A prodigy so fearful to behold;
A few faint stars gleam through the dread serene,
Trembling and pale spectators of the scene;
While the rude mariners, with stern amaze,
As on some tragic execution gaze,
When calm but awful guilt is stretch'd to feel
The torturing fire, or dislocating wheel,
And life, like light from yonder orb, retires,
Spark after spark, till the whole man expires.
Yet may the darken'd sun and mourning skies
Point to a higher, holier sacrifice:
The Brethren's thoughts to Calvary's brow ascend,
Round the Redeemer's Cross their spirits bend,
And while heaven frowns, earth shudders, graves disclose
The forms of sleepers, startled from repose,
They catch the blessing of His latest breath,
Mark His last look, and, through the eclipse of death,
See lovelier beams than Tabor's vision shed,
Wreathe a meek halo round His sacred head.
To Greenland then, with quick compassion, turn
Their deepest sympathies; their bosoms burn,
To her barbarian race, with tongues of flame,
His love, His grief, His glory to proclaim.

O could they view, in this alarming hour,
Those wretched ones, themselves beneath the power
Of darkness, while the shadow clips the sun!
How to their dens the fierce sea-hunters run,
Who death in every shape of peril brave,
By storms and monsters, on the faithless wave,
But now in speechless horror lie aghast,
Till the malignant prodigy be past:
While bolder females, with tormenting spells,
Consult their household dogs as oracles,
And by the yelping of their curs divine,
That still the earth may stand, the sun may shine.
Then forth they creep, and to their offspring tell
What fate of old a youth and maid befell:

How, in the age of night, ere day was born
On the blue hills of undiscover'd morn;
Where one pale cresset twinkled through the shade,
Malina and her gay companions play'd
A thousand mimic sports, as children wont;
They hide, they seek, they shoot, harpoon, and hunt;
When lo! Aninga, passionate and young,
Keen as a wolf, upon his sister sprung,
And pounced his victim;—gentler way to woo
He knew not, or he scorn'd it if he knew:
Malina snatch'd her lamp, and in the dark
Dash'd on his felon-front a hideous mark,
Slipp'd from his foul embrace (and laugh'd aloud),
Soft as the rainbow melting from the cloud;
Then shot to heaven, and in her wondrous flight
Transform'd her image, sparkled into light,
Became the sun, and, through the firmament,
Forth in the glory of a goddess went.
Aninga, baffled, madden'd, unsubdued,
By her own beams the fugitive pursued,
And, when she set, his broad disfigured mien
As the dim moon among the stars was seen;
Thenceforward doom'd his sister's steps to chase,
But ne'er o'ertake in heaven's eternal race.
Yet when his vanish'd orb might seem to sleep,
He takes his monthly pastime on the deep,
Through storms, o'er cataracts, in his kayak sails,
Strikes with unerring dart the polar whales,
Or o'er ice-mountains, in his dog-drawn car,
Pursues the reindeer to the farthest star.
But when eclipse his baneful disk invades,
He prowls for prey among the Greenland maids,
Till roaring drums, belabouring sticks, and cries
Repel the errant Demon to the skies.

The sun hath cast aside his veil;—he shines
With purest splendour till his orb declines;
Then landward, marshalling in black array,
Eruptive vapours drive him from the day;
And night again, with premature control,
Binds light in chains of darkness o'er the pole;
Heaven in one ebon mass of horror scowls:
—Anon a universal whirlwind howls,
With such precipitation dash'd on high,
Not from one point, but from the whole dark sky,
The surges at the onset shrink aghast,
Borne down beneath the paralysing blast;
But soon the mad tornado slants its course,
And rolls them into mountains by main force,
Then, utterly embroil'd through clouds and waves,
As 'twixt two oceans met in conflict, raves.
Now to the passive bark, alternate tost,
Above, below, both sea and sky are lost
All but the giddy summit, where her keel
Hangs in light balance on the billowy wheel;
Then, as the swallow, in his windward flight,
Quivers the wing, returns, and darts down-right,
She plunges through the blind abyss, and o'er
Her groaning masts the cavern'd waters roar.
Ruled by the hurricane, no more the helm
Obeys the pilot;—seas on seas o'erwhelm
The deck; where oft embattled currents meet,
Foam in white whirlpools, flash to spray, retreat,
And rock the vessel with their huge turmoils,
Like the cork-float around the fisher's toils.
Three days of restless agony, that seem
Of one delirious night the waking dream,
The mariners in vain their labours ply,
Or sick at heart in pale despondence lie.
The Brethren, weak, yet firm as when they faced
Winter's ice-legions on his own bleak waste,
In patient hope, that utters no complaint,
Pray without ceasing; pray, and never faint;
Assured that He, who from the tempest's neck
Hath loosed his grasp, still holds it at his beck,
And, with a pulse too deep for mortal sense,
—The secret pulse of his omnipotence,
That beats through every motion of the storm,
—Can check destruction in its wildest form:
Bow'd to His will,—their lot how truly blest,
Who live to serve Him, and who die to rest!

To live and serve Him, is their Lord's decree;
He curbs the wind, He calms the' infuriate sea;
The sea and wind their Maker's yoke obey,
And waft his servants on their destined way.
Though many a league by that disaster driven
'Thwart from their course, with planks and cordage riven,
With hands disabled, and exhausted strength,
The active crew refit their bark at length;
Along the placid gulf, with heaving sails,
That catch from every point propitious gales,
Led like the moon, from infancy to age,
Round the wide zodiac of her pilgrimage,

Onward and smooth their voyage they pursue
Till Greenland's coast again salutes their view.

'Tis sunset: to the firmament serene
The' Atlantic wave reflects a gorgeous scene;
Broad in the cloudless west a belt of gold
Girds the blue hemisphere; above, unroll'd,
The keen clear air grows palpable to sight,
Embodied in a flush of crimson light,
Through which the evening star, with milder gleam,
Descends, to meet her image in the stream.
Far in the east, what spectacle unknown
Allures the eye to gaze on it alone?
—Amidst black rocks, that lift on either hand
Their countless peaks, and mark receding land;
Amidst a tortuous labyrinth of seas,
That shine around the arctic Cyclades;
Amidst a coast of dreariest continent,
In many a shapeless promontory rent;
—O'er rocks, seas, islands, promontories spread,
The Ice-Blink rears its undulated head,
On which the sun, beyond the' horizon shrined,
Hath left his richest garniture behind;
Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fix'd and fluid strides the Alpine bridge,
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries of the sky;
With glacier-battlements, that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity it towers sublime,
—Winter's eternal palace, built by Time:
All human structures by his touch are borne
Down to the dust;—mountains themselves are worn
With his light footsteps; here for ever grows,
Amid the region of unmelting snows,
A monument, where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls.
The sun beholds no mirror, in his race,
That shows a brighter image of his face;
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal-fires on its illumined crest;
The gliding moon around the ramparts wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals;
Beneath, the tide with idle fury raves
To undermine it through a thousand caves;
Rent from its roof, though thundering fragments oft
Plunge to the gulf; immovable aloft,
From age to age, in air, o'er sea, on land,
Its turrets heighten and its piers expand.

Midnight hath told his hour; the moon, yet young,
Hangs in the argent west her bow unstrung;
Larger and fairer, as her lustre fades,
Sparkle the stars amidst the deepening shades:
Jewels, more rich than night's regalia, gem
The distant Ice-Blink's spangled diadem;
Like a new morn from orient darkness, there
Phosphoric splendours kindle in mid-air,
As though from heaven's self-opening portals came
Legions of spirits in an orb of flame,
—Flame, that from every point an arrow sends
Far as the concave firmament extends:
Spun with the tissue of a million lines,
Glistening like gossamer the welkin shines:
The constellations in their pride look pale
Through the quick-trembling brilliance of that veil.
Then, suddenly converged, the meteors rush
O'er the wide south; one deep vermilion blush
O'erspreads Orion glaring on the flood,
And rabid Sirius foams through fire and blood;
Again the circuit of the pole they range,
Motion and figure every moment change,
Through all the colours of the rainbow run,
Or blaze like wrecks of a dissolving sun;
Wide ether burns with glory, conflict, flight,
And the glad ocean dances in the light.

The seaman's jealous eye askance surveys
This pageantry of evanescent rays,
While in the horror of misgiving fear
New storms already thunder on his ear:
But morning comes, and brings him sweet release;
Day shines and sets; at evening all is peace;
Another and another day is past;
The fourth appears,—the loveliest and the last!
The sails are furl'd; the anchor drags the sand;
The boat hath cross'd the creek;—the Brethren land.

CANTO FOURTH.

Retrospect of ancient Greenland:—The Discovery of Iceland, of Greenland, of Wineland. The Norwegian Colonies on the Eastern and Western Coasts of Greenland; the Appearance of the Skraellings, or modern Greenlanders, in the West, and the Destruction of the Norwegian Settlers in that quarter.

Here while in peace the weary Pilgrims rest,
Turn we our voyage from the new-found west,
Sail up the current of departed time,
And seek along its banks that vanish'd clime
By ancient scalds in Runic verse renown'd,
Now, like old Babylon, no longer found.
—“Oft was I weary when I toil'd at thee;”
This, on an oar abandon'd to the sea,
Some hand had graven:—From what founder'd boat
It fell;—how long on ocean's waves afloat;
—Who mark'd it with that melancholy line;
No record tells:—Greenland! such fate was thine;
Whate'er thou wast, of thee remains no more
Than a brief legend on a foundling oar;
And he, whose song would now revive thy fame,
Grasps but the shadow of a mighty name.

From Asia's fertile womb, when Time was young,
And earth a wreck, the sires of nations sprung;
In Shinar's land of rivers, Babel's tower
Stood the lorn relic of their scatter'd power;
A broken pillar, snapt as from the spheres,
Slow-wasting through the silent lapse of years,
While o'er the regions by the Flood destroy'd
The builders breathed new life throughout the void,
Soul, passion, intellect; till blood of man
Through every artery of Nature ran,
O'er eastern islands pour'd its quickening stream,
Caught the warm crimson of the western beam,
Beneath the burning line made fountains start
In the dry wilderness of Afric's heart,
And through the torpid north, with genial heat,
Taught love's exhilarating pulse to beat;
Till the great sun, in his perennial round,
Man, of all climes the restless native, found,
Pursuing folly in his vain career,
As if existence were immortal here;
While on the fathers' graves the sons, untaught
By their mischance, the same illusions sought,
By gleams and shadows measured woe and bliss,
As though unborn for any world but this.

Five thousand years, unvisited, unknown,
Greenland lay slumbering in the frozen zone,—
While heaven's resplendent host pursued their way
To light the wolf and eagle to their prey,
And tempests o'er the main their terrors spread
To rock Leviathan upon his bed;—
Ere Ingolf his undaunted flag unfurl'd,
To search the secrets of the polar world.
'Twas liberty, that fires the coldest veins,
And exile, famine, death, prefers to chains;
'Twas liberty, through floods unplough'd before,
That led his gallant crew from Norway's shore;
They cut their cable, and in thunder broke
With their departing oars the tyrant's yoke;
The deep their country, and their bark their home,
A floating isle, on which they joy'd to roam
Amidst immensity; with waves and wind
Now sporting and now wrestling;—unconfined,
Save by the blue surrounding firmament,
Full, yet for ever widening as they went;
Thus sail'd those mariners, unheeding where
They found a port, if Freedom anchor'd there.

By stars that never set their course they steer'd,
And northward with indignant impulse veer'd;
For sloth had lull'd, and luxury o'errun,
And bondage seized, the realms that loved the sun.

At length by mountain-ice, with perils strange,
Menaced, repell'd, and forced their track to change,
They bade the unimprison'd raven fly,
A living compass through the chartless sky:
Up to the zenith, swift as fire, he soar'd,
Through the clear boundless atmosphere explored
The dim horizon stretch'd beneath his sight;
Then to the west full-onward shot his flight:
Thither they follow; till, from Thule's rocks,
Around the bird of tempests rose the flocks
Of screaming sea-fowl, widening ring o'er ring,
Till heaven grew dark,—then, wheeling on the wing
Landward, they whiten all the rocks below,
Or, diving, melt into the gulf like snow.
Pleased with the proud discovery, Ingolf gave
His lintel and his doorposts to the wave,
Divining, as they drifted to the strand,
The will of destiny,—the place to land.
There on a homeless soil his foot he placed,
Framed his hut-palace, colonised the waste,
And ruled his horde with patriarchal sway;
—Where justice reigns, 'tis freedom to obey:
And there his race, in long succession blest,
(Like generations in the eagle's nest,
Upon their own hereditary rock,)
Flourish'd, invincible to every shock
Of time, chance, foreign force, or civil rage,—
A noble dynasty from age to age;
And Iceland shone for generous lore renown'd,
A northern light, when all was gloom around.

Ere long, by brave adventurers on the tide,
A new Hesperian region was descried,
Which fancy deem'd, or fable feign'd, so fair,
Fleets from old Norway pour'd their settlers there,
Who traced and peopled far that double shore,
Round whose repelling rocks two oceans roar,
Till, at the southern promontory, tost
By tempests, each is in its rival lost.
Thus Greenland (so that arctic world they named)
Was planted, and to utmost Calpe famed
For wealth exhaustless, which her seas could boast,
And prodigies of Nature on her coast;
Where, in the green recess of every glen,
The House of Prayer o'ertopt the' abodes of men,
And flocks and cattle grazed by summer-streams,
That track'd the valleys with meandering gleams.
While on the mountains ice eternal frown'd,
And growing glaciers deepen'd tow'rds the ground,
Year after year, as centuries roll'd away,
Nor lost one moment till that judgment-day
When eastern Greenland from the world was rent,
Ingulf'd,—or fix'd one frozen continent.

'Twere long and dreary to recount in rhyme
The crude traditions of that long-lost clime:
To sing of wars, by barbarous chieftains waged,
In which as fierce and noble passions raged,
Heroes as subtle, bold, remorseless, fought,
And deeds as dark and terrible were wrought,
As round Troy-walls became the splendid themes
Of Homer's song, and Jove's Olympian dreams;
When giant-prowess, in the iron field,
With single arm made phalanx'd legions yield;
When battle was but massacre,—the strife
Of murderers,—steel to steel, and life to life.
—Who follows Homer, takes the field too late;
Though stout as Hector, sure of Hector's fate,
A wound as from Achilles' spear he feels,
Falls, and adorns the Grecian's chariot-wheels.

Nor stay we monkish legends to rehearse;
To build their cloister-walls in Gothic verse;
Of groves and gardens, wine and music, tell;
Fresh roses breathing round the hermit's cell,
And baths, in which Diana's nymphs might lave,
—From earth's self-opening veins the blood-warm wave,
Whose genial streams, amidst disparted ice,
Made laps of verdure,—like those isles of spice
In eastern seas; or rich oases, graced
With flowers and fountains, in the Libyan waste.

Rather the muse would stretch a mightier wing,
Of a new world the earliest dawn to sing;

How,—long ere Science, in a dream of thought,
Earth's younger daughter to Columbus brought,
And sent him, like the Faerie Prince, in quest
Of that “bright vestal thronëd in the west.”
—Greenland's bold sons, by instinct, sallied forth
On barks, like icebergs drifting from the north,
Cross'd without magnet undiscover'd seas,
And, all surrendering to the stream and breeze,
Touch'd on the line of that twin-bodied land
That stretches forth to either pole a hand,
From arctic wilds that see no winter-sun
To where the oceans of the world are one,
And round Magellan's straits, Fuego's shore,
Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific roar.

Regions of beauty there these rovers found;
The flowery hills with emerald woods were crown'd;
Spread o'er the vast savannahs, buffalo herds
Ranged without master; and the bright-wing'd birds
Made gay the sunshine as they glanced along,
Or turn'd the air to music with their song.

Here from his mates a German youth had stray'd,
Where the broad river cleft the forest glade;
Swarming with alligator-shoals, the flood
Blazed in the sun, or moved in clouds of blood;
The wild boar rustled headlong through the brake;
Like a live arrow leap'd the rattle-snake;
The uncouth shadow of the climbing bear
Crawl'd on the grass, while he aspired in air;
Anon with hoofs, like hail, the greenwood rang,
Among the scattering deer a panther sprang:
The stripling fear'd not,—yet he trod with awe,
As if enchantment breathed o'er all he saw,
Till in his path uprose a wilding vine;
—Then o'er his memory rush'd the noble Rhine;
Home and its joys, with fulness of delight,
So rapt his spirit, so beguiled his sight,
That, in those glens of savage solitude,
Vineyards and corn-fields, towns and spires, he view'd,
And through the image-chamber of his soul
The days of other years like shadows stole:
All that he once had been, again he grew;
Through every stage of life he pass'd anew;
The playmates of his infancy were there,
With dimpled cheeks, blue eyes, and flaxen hair;
The blithe companions of his riper youth,
And one whose heart was love, whose soul was truth.
—When the quick-mingling pictures of that dream
(Like broken scenery on a troubled stream,
Where sky and landscape, light and darkness, run
Through widening circles,) harmonised in one,
His father's cot appear'd, with vine-leaves drest,
And clusters pendent round the swallow's nest;
In front the little garden, at whose gate,
Amidst their progeny, his parents sate,

He only absent;—but his mother's eye
Look'd through a tear,—she reach'd him with a sigh:
Then in a moment vanish'd time and space,
And with a shout he rush'd to her embrace.
Round hills and dales the joyful tidings spread;
All ran to welcome Tyrker from the dead.
With bliss inebriate, in that giddy trance,
He led his waltzing partner through the dance;
And, while he pluck'd the grapes that blush'd at hand,
Trod the rich wine-press in his native land,
Quaff'd the full flowing goblet, loosed his tongue,
And songs of vintage, harvest, battle, sung.
At length his shipmates came: their laughter broke
The gay delusion; in alarm he 'woke:
Transport to silent melancholy changed;
At once from love, and joy, and hope estranged,
O'er his blank mind, with cold bereaving spell,
Came that heart-sickness which no tongue can tell;
—Felt when, in foreign climes, 'midst sounds unknown,
We hear the speech or music of our own,
Roused to delight, from drear abstraction start,
And feel our country beating at our heart;
The rapture of a moment;—in its birth
It perishes for ever from the earth;
And dumb, like shipwreck'd mariners we stand,
Eyeing by turns the ocean and the land,
Breathless;—till tears the struggling thought release,
And the lorn spirit weeps itself to peace.

Wineland the glad discoverers call'd that shore,
And back the tidings of its riches bore;
But soon return'd with colonising bands,
—Men that at home would sigh for unknown lands;
Men of all weathers, fit for every toil,
War, commerce, pastime, peace, adventure, spoil;
Bold master-spirits, where they touch'd they gain'd
Ascendance; where they fix'd their foot they reign'd.
Both coasts they long inherited, though wide
Dissever'd; stemming to and fro the tide,
Free as the Syrian dove explores the sky,
Their helm their hope, their compass in their eye,
They found at will, where'er they pleased to roam,
The ports of strangers or their northern home,
Still 'midst tempestuous seas and zones of ice,
Loved as their own, their unlost Paradise.
—Yet was their Paradise for ever lost:
War, famine, pestilence, the power of frost,
Their woes combining, wither'd from the earth
This late creation, like a timeless birth,
The fruit of age and weakness, forced to light,
Breathing awhile,—relapsing into night.

Ages had seen the vigorous race, that sprung
From Norway's stormy forelands, rock'd when young
In ocean's cradle, hardening as they rose,
Like mountain-pines amidst perennial snows;
—Ages had seen these sturdiest sons of Time
Strike root and flourish in that ruffian clime,
Commerce with lovelier lands and wealthier hold,
Yet spurn the lures of luxury and gold;
Beneath the umbrage of the Gallic vine,
For moonlight snows and cavern-shelter pine;
Turn from Campanian fields a lofty eye
To gaze upon the glorious Alps, and sigh,
Remembering Greenland; more and more endear'd,
As far and farther from its shores they steer'd;
Greenland their world,—and all was strange beside;
Elsewhere they wander'd: here they lived and died.

At length a swarthy tribe, without a name,
Unknown the point of windward whence they came;
The power by which stupendous gulfs they cross'd,
Or compass'd wilds of everlasting frost,
Alike mysterious;—found their sudden way
To Greenland; pour'd along the western bay
Their straggling families; and seized the soil
For their domain, the ocean for their spoil.
Skraellings the Normans call'd these hordes in scorn,
That seem'd created on the spot,—though born
In trans-Atlantic climes, and thither brought
By paths as covert as the birth of thought;
They were at once;—the swallow-tribes in spring
Thus daily multiply upon the wing,
As if the air, their element of flight,
Brought forth new broods from darkness every night;
Slipt from the secret hand of Providence,
They come we see not how, nor know we whence.

A stunted, stern, uncouth, amphibious stock,
Hewn from the living marble of the rock,
Or sprung from mermaids, and in ocean's bed,
With orcs and seals, in sunless caverns bred,
They might have held, from unrecorded time,
Sole patrimony in that hideous clime,
So lithe their limbs, so fenced their frames to bear
The intensest rigours of the polar air;
Nimble, and muscular, and keen to run
The rein-deer down a circuit of the sun;
To climb the slippery cliffs, explore their cells,
And storm and sack the sea-birds' citadels;
In bands, through snows, the mother-bear to trace,
Slay with their darts the cubs in her embrace,
And, while she lick'd their bleeding wounds, to brave
Her deadliest vengeance in her inmost cave:
Train'd with inimitable skill to float,
Each, balanced in his bubble of a boat,
With dexterous paddle steering through the spray,
With poised harpoon to strike his plunging prey,
As though the skiff, the seaman, oar, and dart
Were one compacted body, by one heart
With instinct, motion, pulse, empower'd to ride
A human nautilus upon the tide;
Or with a fleet of kayaks to assail
The desperation of the stranded whale,
When, wedged 'twixt jagged rocks, he writhes and rolls
In agony among the ebbing shoals,
Lashing the waves to foam, until the flood,
From wounds, like geysers, seems a bath of blood,
Echo all night dumb-pealing to his roar,
Till morn beholds him slain along the shore.

Of these,—hereafter should the lyre be strung
To arctic themes,—may glorious days be sung;
Now be our task the sad reverse to tell,
How in their march the nobler Normans fell;
—Whether by dire disease, that turn'd the breath
Of bounteous heaven to pestilence and death,
In number, strength, and spirit worn away,
Their lives became the cool assassin's prey;
—Or in the battle-field, as Skraellings boast,
These pigmies put to flight their giant-host,
When front to front on scowling cliffs they stood,
And shot their barbs athwart the parting flood;
Arrow smote arrow, dart encounter'd dart,
From hand to hand, impaling heart for heart;
Till spent their missiles: quick as in a dream
The images are changed; across the stream
The Skraellings rush'd, the precipices scaled;
—O'erwhelm'd by multitudes, the Normans fail'd:

A scatter'd remnant to the south retired,
But one by one along their route expired:
They perish'd;—History can no more relate
Of their obscure and unlamented fate:
They perish'd;—yet along that western shore,
Where Commerce spread her colonies of yore,
Ruins of temples and of homes are traced,
—Steps of magnificence amidst the waste
Where Time hath trod, and left those wrecks to show
That Life hath been, where all is Death below.

CANTO FIFTH.

The Depopulation of the Norwegian Colonies on the Eastern Coast of Greenland, and the Abandonment of Intercourse with it from Europe, in consequence of the Increase of the Arctic Ices, about the beginning of the Fifteenth Century.

Launch on the gulf, my little Greenland bark!
Bear me through scenes unutterably dark;
Scenes with the mystery of Nature seal'd,
Nor till the day of doom to be reveal'd.
What though the spirits of the arctic gales
Freeze round thy prow, or fight against thy sails,
Safe as Arion, whom the dolphin bore,
Enamour'd of his music, to the shore,
On thee adventuring o'er an unknown main,
I raise to warring elements a strain
Of kindred harmony:—O, lend your breath,
Ye tempests! while I sing this reign of death:
Utter dark sayings of the days of old;
In parables upon my harp unfold
Deeds perish'd from remembrance; truth, array'd,
Like heaven by night, in emblematic shade,
When shines the horoscope, and star on star
By what they are not lead to what they are;
Atoms, that twinkle in an infant's eye,
Are worlds, suns, systems in the' unbounded sky:
Thus the few fabled woes my strains create
Are hieroglyphics in a book of Fate;
And while the shadowy symbols I unroll,
Imagination reads a direr scroll.
Wake, ye wild visions! o'er the northern deep,
On clouds and winds, like warrior-spectres sweep;
Show by what plagues and hurricanes destroy'd,
A breathing realm became a torpid void!

The floods are raging, and the gales blow high,
Low as a dungeon-roof impends the sky;
Prisoners of hope, between the clouds and waves,
Six fearless sailors man yon boat, that braves
Peril redoubling upon peril past:
—From childhood nurslings of the wayward blast,
Aloft as o'er a buoyant arch they go,
Whose keystone breaks;—as deep they plunge below;
Unyielding, though the strength of man be vain;
Struggling, though borne like surf along the main;
In front, a battlement of rocks; in rear,
Billow on billow bounding: near, more near,
They verge to ruin;—life and death depend
On the next impulse;—shrieks and prayers ascend;
When, like the fish that mounts on drizzling wings,
Sheer from the gulf the' ejected vessel springs,
And grounds on inland ice, beyond the track
Of hissing foam-wreaths, whence the tide roll'd back;
Then ere that tide, returning to the charge,
Swallows the wreck, the captives are at large.
On either hand steep hills obstruct their path;
Behind, the ocean roaring in his wrath,
Mad as a Libyan wilderness by night,
With all its lions up, in chase or fight.
The fugitives right onward shun the beach,
Nor tarry till the inmost cove they reach;
Recluded in the labyrinthine dell,
Like the last hollow of a spiral shell.
There, with the axe or knife which haste could save,
They build a house;—perhaps they dig a grave:
Of solid snow, well-squared, and piled in blocks,
Brilliant as hewn from alabaster rocks,
Their palace rises, narrowing to the roof,
And freezes into marble, tempest-proof;
Night closing round, within its shade they creep,
And weary Nature sinks at once to sleep.

Oh! could we walk amidst their dreams, and see
All that they have been, are, or wish to be,
In fancy's world!—each at his own fire-side:
One greets a parent; one a new-made bride;
Another clasps his babe with fond embrace,
A smile in slumber mantling o'er his face;
All dangers are forgotten in a kiss,
Or but remember'd to exalt the bliss.
—One wounded sufferer wakes, with pain opprest,
Yet are his thoughts at home among the rest;
Then beams his eye, his heart dilated burns,
Till the dark vigil to a vision turns,
That vision to reality: and home
Is so endear'd, he vows no more to roam.

Ha! suddenly he starts: with trembling lips,
Salt shower drops, oozing through the roof, he sips:
Aware that instant, yet alarm'd too late,
—The sea hath burst its barrier, fix'd their fate;
Escape impossible: the tempests urge
Through the deep dell the inundating surge:
Nor wall nor roof the' impetuous flood controls;
Above, around, within, the deluge rolls:
He calls his comrades;—ere their doom be known,
'Tis past!—the snow-house utterly o'erthrown,
Its inmates vanish; never to be found,
Living or dead, on habitable ground.

There is a beauteous hamlet in the vale;
Green are the fields around it; sweetly sail
The twilight shadows o'er the darkening scene,
Earth, air, and ocean, all alike serene;
Dipp'd in the hues of sunset, wreathed in zones,
The clouds are resting on their mountain-thrones:
One peak alone exalts its glacier crest,
A golden paradise, above the rest;
Thither the day with lingering steps retires,
And in its own blue element expires:
Thus Aaron laid his gorgeous robes aside
On Horeb's consecrated top, and died.
The moon, meanwhile, o'er ocean's sombre bed,
New-risen, a thousand glow-worm lights hath spread;
From east to west the wildfire splendours glance,
And all the billows in her glory dance;
Till, in mid-heaven, her orb might seem the eye
Of Providence, wide-watching from the sky,
While Nature slumbers;—emblem of His grace
Whose presence fills the infinite of space.

The clouds have left the mountains; coldly bright,
Their icy summits shed cerulean light;
The steep declivities between assume
A horror of unfathomable gloom:
The village sleeps;—from house to house, the ear
Of yonder sentinel no sound can hear:
A maniac;—he, while calmer heads repose,
Takes his night-round, to tell the stars his woes;
Woes which his noble heart to frenzy stung;
—He hath no bard, and they remain unsung.
A warrior once, victorious arms he bore,
And bears them still, although his wars are o'er;
For 'tis his boast, with shield and sword in hand,
To be the guardian Angel of the land.
Mark with what stern solemnity he stalks,
And to himself, as to a legion, talks:
Now deep in council with his chiefs; anon
He starts, as at the trumpet; leads them on,
And wins the day;—his battle-shout alarms
None but the infant in the nurse's arms;
Soon hush'd, but closer to her side, it sleeps;
While he abroad his watch in silence keeps.

At every door he halts, and brings a sigh,
But leaves a blessing, when he marches by:
He stops; from that low roof a deadly groan
Hath made unutterable anguish known;
A spirit into eternity hath pass'd;
A spouse, a father, there hath breathed his last.
The widow and her little ones weep not;
In its excess their misery is forgot,
One dumb, dark moment;—then from all their eyes
Rain the salt tears, and loud their wailings rise:
Ah! little think that family forlorn
How brief the parting;—they shall meet ere morn!
For lo! the witness of their pangs hath caught
A sight that startles madness into thought:
Back from their gate unconsciously he reels;
A resurrection of his soul he feels.
There is a motion in the air: his eye
Blinks as it fear'd the falling of the sky.
The splendid peak of adamantine ice,
At sunset like an earthly paradise,
And in the moon of such empyrean hue,
It seem'd to bring the unseen world to view;
—That splendid peak, the Power (which to the spheres
Had piled its turrets through a thousand years)
Touches as lightly as the passing wind,
And the huge mass, o'erbalanced, undermined,
And dislocated from its base of snow,
Slides down the slope, majestically slow,
Till, o'er the precipice down headlong sent,
And in ten thousand thousand spangles rent,
It piles a hill where spread a vale before:
—From rock to rock the echoes round the shore
Tell with their deep artillery the fate
Of the whole village crush'd beneath its weight.
—The sleepers wake,—their homes in ruins hurl'd,—
They wake—from death into another world.
The gazing maniac, palsied into stone,
Amidst the wreck of ice, survives alone;
A sudden interval of reason gleams,
Steady and clear, amidst his wildering dreams,
But shows reality in such a shape,
'Twere rapture back to frenzy to escape.

Again the clouds of desolation roll,
Blotting all old remembrance from his soul:
Whate'er his sorrows or his joys have been,
His spirit grows embodied through this scene;
With eyes of agony, and clenching hands,
Fix'd in recoil, a frozen form he stands,
And, smit with wonder at his people's doom,
Becomes the monument upon their tomb.

Behold a scene, magnificent and new;
Nor land nor water meet 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,
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.
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,
Youth, beauty, valour, 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,
Whom rocks impassable, or winds and tide,
Fickle and false, in summer months divide.

The scene runs round with motion, rings with mirth,
—No happier spot upon the peopled earth;
The drifted snow to dust the travellers beat,
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.
Ere long 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 harness'd reindeer in the race;
Borne without wheels, a flight of rival cars
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 form'd a sea of glass,
With pantomimic change the skaters pass;
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,
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;
Gray-beard 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;
The days gone by, no more rejoice the old.

There is a boy, a solitary boy,
Who takes no part in all this whirl of joy,
Yet, in the speechless transport of his soul,
He lives, and moves, and breathes throughout the whole:
Him should destruction spare, the plot of earth,
That forms his play-ground, gave a poet birth,
Who, on the wings of his immortal lays,
Thine heroes, Greenland! to the stars shall raise.
It must not be:—abruptly from the show
He turns his eyes; his thoughts are gone below
To sound the depths of ocean, where his mind
Creates the wonders which it cannot find.
Listening, as oft he listens in a shell
To the mock tide's alternate fall and swell,
He kneels upon the ice,—inclines his ear,
And hears,—or does he only seem to hear?—
A sound, as though the Genius of the deep
Heaved a long sigh, awaking out of sleep.
He starts;—'twas but a pulse within his brain!
No;—for he feels it beat through every vein;
Groan following groan, (as from a giant's breast,
Beneath a burying mountain, ill at rest,)
With awe ineffable his spirit thrills,
And rapture fires his blood, while terror chills.
The keen expression of his eye alarms
His mother; she hath caught him in her arms,
And learn'd the cause;—that cause no sooner known,
From lip to lip o'er many a league is flown;

Voices to voices, prompt as signals, rise
In shrieks of consternation to the skies:
Those skies, meanwhile, with gathering darkness scowl;
Hollow and winterly the bleak winds howl.
—From morn till noon had ether smiled serene,
Save one black-belted cloud, far eastward seen,
Like a snow-mountain;—there in ambush lay
The' undreaded tempest, panting for his prey:
That cloud by stealth hath through the welkin spread,
And hangs in meteor-twilight over-head;
At foot, beneath the adamantine floor,
Loose in their prison-house the surges roar:
To every eye, ear, heart, the' alarm is given,
And landward crowds, (like flocks of sea-fowl driven,
When storms are on the wing,) in wild affright,
On foot, in sledges, urge their panic flight,
In hope the refuge of the shore to gain
Ere the disruption of the struggling main,
Foretold by many a stroke, like lightning sent
In thunder, through the' unstable continent,
Which now, elastic on the swell below,
Rolls high in undulation to and fro.
Men, reindeer, dogs, the giddy impulse feel,
And, jostling headlong, back and forward reel:
While snow, sleet, hail, or whirling gusts of wind,
Exhaust, bewilder, stop the breath, and blind.
All is dismay and uproar; some have found
Death for deliverance, as they leap'd on ground
Swept back into the flood:—but hope is vain:
Ere half the fugitives the beach can gain,
The fix'd ice, severing from the shore, with shocks
Of earthquake violence, bounds against the rocks;
Then suddenly, while on the verge they stand,
The whole recoils for ever from the land,
And leaves a gulf of foam along the shore,
In which whoever plunge are seen no more.

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;
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,
These groans of agony from wretches tost
On rocks and whirlpools,—in thy storms be drown'd,
The crash of mountain-ice to atoms ground,
And rage of elements!—while winds, that yell
Like demons, peal the universal knell,
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,
He holds his mirror to a hundred lands;
While cheering gales pursue the eager chase
Of billows round immeasurable space.

Where are the multitudes of yesterday?
At morn they came; at eve they pass'd away.
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
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;
Here, when the bitterness of death had pass'd
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
In the brown vigour 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,
Who hoped, like him, a gentle heart to gain
By valorous enterprise on land or main.
—These, when the ocean-pavement fail'd their feet,
Sought on a glacier's crags a safe retreat;
But in the shock, from its foundation torn,
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.
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.
—How long, by that precarious raft upbuoy'd,
They blindly drifted on a shoreless void;
How long they suffer'd, or how soon they found
Rest in the gulf, or peace on living ground;
—Whether, by hunger, cold, and grief consumed,
They perish'd miserably—and, unentomb'd,
(While on that frigid bier their corses lay,)
Became the sea-fowl's or the sea-bear's prey;
—Whether the wasting mound, by swift degrees,
Exhaled in mist and vanish'd from the seas,
While they, too weak to struggle even in death,
Lock'd in each other's arms resign'd their breath,
And their white skeletons, beneath the wave,
Lie intertwined in one sepulchral cave;
—Or meeting some Norwegian bark at sea,
They deem'd its deck a world of liberty;
—Or, sunward sailing, on green Erin's sod
They kneel'd, and worshipp'd a delivering God,
Where yet the blood they brought from Greenland runs
Among the noblest of our sister's sons,
—Is all unknown:—their iceberg disappears
Amidst the flood of unreturning years.

Ages are fled; and Greenland's hour draws nigh;
Seal'd is the judgment; all her race must die:
Commerce forsakes the' unvoyageable seas,
That year by year with keener rigour freeze;
The embargoed waves in narrower channels roll
To blue Spitzbergen and the utmost pole:
A hundred colonies, erewhile that lay
On the green marge of many a shelter'd bay,
Lapse to the wilderness; their tenants throng
Where streams in summer, turbulent and strong,
With molten ice from inland Alps supplied,
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,
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
The strength of muscle and the spring of mind;
Man droops, his spirits waste, his powers decay,
—His generation soon shall pass away.

At moonless midnight, on this naked coast,
How beautiful in heaven the starry host!
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
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 deferr'd,)
Since last for Europe sail'd a Greenland prow,
Her whole marine,—so shorn is Greenland now,
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
Eclipsed at rising o'er the waves afar,
As if—for so would fond expectance think—
A sail had cross'd it on the' horizon's brink.
His fervent soul, in ecstasy outdrawn,
Glows with the shadows kindling through the dawn,

Till every bird that flashes through the brine
Appears an arm'd and gallant brigantine;
And every sound along the air that comes,
The voice of clarions and the roll of drums.
—'Tis she! 'tis she! the well-known keel at last,
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
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
Lights up a thousand radiant points from one.
The pilots launch their boasts:—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.
—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 open'd, there to see
How, in serene and dreadful majesty,
Sits the destroying Angel at the helm!
—He, who hath lately march'd from realm to realm,
And, from the palace to the peasant's shed,
Made all the living kindred to the dead:
Nor man alone,—dumb nature felt his wrath,
Drought, mildew, murrain, strew'd his carnage-path;
Harvest and vintage cast their timeless fruit,
Forests before him wither'd from the root.
To Greenland now, with unexhausted power,
He comes commission'd; and in evil hour
Propitious elements prepare his way;
His day of landing is a festal day.

A boat arrives;—to those who scale the deck,
Of life appears but one disastrous wreck!
Fall'n from the rudder, which he fain had grasp'd,
But stronger Death his wrestling hold unclasp'd,
The film of darkness freezing o'er his eyes,
A lukewarm corpse, the brave commander lies;
Survivor sole of all his buried crew,
Whom one by one the rife contagion slew,
Just when the cliffs of Greenland cheer'd his sight,
Even from their pinnacle his soul took flight.
Chill'd at the spectacle, the pilots gaze
One on another, lost in blank amaze;
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,
Circled by whispers, strike the uproar dumb.
Rumour 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.

The monks, who claim the ship, divide the stores
Of food and raiment at their convent-doors.
—A mother, hastening to her cheerless shed,
Breaks to her little ones untasted bread;
Clamorous as nestling-birds, the hungry band
Receive a mortal portion at her hand:
On each would equal love the best confer,
Each by distinct affection dear to her;
One the first pledge that to her spouse she gave,
And one unborn till he was in his grave;
This was his darling, that to her most kind;
A fifth was once a twin, the sixth is blind:
In each she lives;—in each by turns she dies;
Smitten by pestilence before her eyes,
Three days, and all are slain;—the heaviest doom
Is hers: their ice-barr'd cottage is their tomb.
—The wretch whose limbs are impotent with cold,
In the warm comfort of a mantle roll'd,
Lies down to slumber on his soul's desire;
But wakes at morn, as wrapt in flames of fire:
Not Hercules, when from his breast he tore
The cloak envenom'd with the Centaur's gore,
Felt sharper pangs than he, who, mad with rage,
Dives in the gulf, or rolls in snow, to' assuage
His quenchless agony; the rankling dart
Within him burns till it consumes his heart.
From vale to vale the' affrighted victims fly,
But catch or give the plague with every sigh;
A touch contaminates the purest veins,
Till the Black Death through all the region reigns.

Comes there no ship again to Greenland's shore?
There comes another:—there shall come no more;
Nor this shall reach an haven:—What are these
Stupendous monuments upon the seas?
Works of Omnipotence, in wondrous forms,
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,
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,
Not wreck'd, nor stranded, yet for ever 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,
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 veer'd,
Quicksand, nor rock, nor foe, nor tempest fear'd;
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:
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;
Congeal'd to adamant, his frame shall last,
Though empires change, till time and tide be past.

On deck, in groups embracing as they died,
Singly, erect, or slumbering side by side,
Behold the crew!—They sail'd, with hope elate,
For eastern Greenland; till, ensnared by fate,
In toils that mock'd 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
The blunt rebound of Death's benumbing dart,
And each, a petrifaction at his post,
Look'd on yon father, and gave up the ghost:
He, meekly kneeling, with his hands upraised,
His beard of driven snow, eyes fix'd and glazed,
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,
Till his tongue fail'd, he spoke of joys above.
Now motionless, amidst the icy air,
He breathes from marble lips unutter'd prayer.
The clouds condensed, with dark unbroken hue
Of stormy purple, overhang his view,
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,
And round the' expiring saint such visions burn
As if the gates of Paradise were thrown
Wide open to receive his soul;—'tis flown:
The glory vanishes, and over all
Cimmerian darkness spreads her funeral pall!

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,
The peopled deck, and full-rigg'd 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 emboss'd with sea-weed shines.
From age to age increased with annual snow,
This new Mont Blanc among the clouds may glow,
Whose conic peak, that earliest greets the dawn,
And latest from the sun's shut eye withdrawn,

Shall from the zenith, through incumbent gloom,
Burn like a lamp upon this naval tomb.
But when the' archangel's trumpet sounds on high,
The pile shall burst to atoms through the sky,
And leave its dead, upstarting at the call,
Naked and pale, before the Judge of all.

Once more to Greenland's long-forsaken beach,
Which foot of man again shall never reach,
Imagination wings her flight, explores
The march of Pestilence along the shores,
And sees how Famine in his steps hath paced,
While Winter laid the soil for ever waste.
Dwellings are heaps of fall'n or falling stones,
The charnel-houses of unburied bones,
On which obscene and prowling monsters fed,
But, with the ravin in their jaws, fell dead.
Thus while Destruction, blasting youth and age,
Raged till it wanted victims for its rage,—
Love, the last feeling that from life retires,
Blew the faint sparks of his unfuell'd fires.
In the cold sunshine of yon narrow dell
Affection lingers;—there two lovers dwell,
Greenland's whole family: nor long forlorn;
There comes a visitant,—a babe is born.
O'er his meek helplessness the parents smiled;
'Twas Hope;—for Hope is every mother's child:
Then seem'd they, in that world of solitude,
The Eve and Adam of a race renew'd.
Brief happiness! too perilous to last;
The moon hath wax'd and waned, and all is past:
Behold the end:—one morn, athwart the wall,
They mark'd the shadow of a reindeer fall,
Bounding in tameless freedom o'er the snow;
The father track'd him, and with fatal bow
Smote down the victim; but before his eyes,
A rabid she-bear pounced upon the prize;
A shaft into the spoiler's flank he sent,
She turn'd in wrath, and limb from limb had rent
The hunter,—but his dagger's plunging steel
With riven bosom made the monster reel;
Unvanquish'd, both to closer combat flew,
Assailants each, till each the other slew:
Mingling their blood from mutual wounds, they lay
Stretch'd on the carcass of their antler'd prey.

Meanwhile his partner waits, her heart at rest,
No burden but her infant on her breast.
With him she slumbers, or with him she plays,
And tells him all her dreams of future days,
Asks him a thousand questions, feigns replies,
And reads whate'er she wishes in his eyes.
—Red evening comes; no husband's shadow falls
Where fell the reindeer's o'er the latticed walls:
'Tis night; no footstep sounds towards her door:
The day returns,—but he returns no more.
In frenzy, forth she sallies; and with cries,
To which no voice except her own replies
In frightful echoes, starting all around,
Where human voice again shall never sound,
She seeks him, finds him not: some angel-guide
In mercy turns her from the corpse aside;
Perhaps his own freed spirit, lingering near,
Who waits to waft her to a happier sphere,
But leads her first, at evening, to their cot,
Where lies the little one, all day forgot;
Imparadised in sleep she finds him there,
Kisses his cheek, and breathes a mother's prayer.
Three days she languishes, nor can she shed
One tear, between the living and the dead:
When her lost spouse comes o'er the widow's thought,
The pangs of memory are to madness wrought;
But when her suckling's eager lips are felt,
Her heart would fain—but oh! it cannot—melt;
At length it breaks, while on her lap he lies,
With baby-wonder gazing in her eyes.
Poor orphan! mine is not a hand to trace
Thy little story, last of all thy race!
Not long thy sufferings; cold and colder grown,
The arms that clasp thee chill thy limbs to stone.
—'Tis done:—from Greenland's coast, the latest sigh
Bore infant innocence beyond the sky.