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

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.