5. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me, That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads,—you and I are old; Old hath yet age his honour and his toil; Death closes all; but something ere the end, It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are, - Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson: Ulysses. That so much of Scripture should be written in the language of poetry has excited some surprise and created some inquiry; and yet in nothing do we perceive more clearly than in this, the genuineness, power, and divinity of the oracles of our faith. As the language of poetry is that into which all earnest natures are insensibly betrayed, so it is the only speech which has in it the power of permanent impression. The language of the imagination is the native language of man. It is the language of his excited intellect, of his aroused passions, of his devotion, of all the higher moods and tempera 6. ments of his mind. It was meet, therefore, that it should be the language of his revelation from God. The language of poetry is thus the language of the inspired volume. The Bible is a mass of beautiful figures; its words and its thoughts are alike poetical; it has gathered around its central truths all natural beauty and interest; it is a Temple with one altar and one God, but illuminated by a thousand varied lights, and studded with a thousand ornaments. It has substantially but one declaration to make, but it utters that in the voices of the creation. It has pressed into its service the animals of the forest, the flowers of the field, the stars of heaven, all the elements of nature. The lion spurning the sands of the desert, the wild roe leaping over the mountains, the lamb led in silence to the slaughter, the goat speeding to the wilderness; the rose blossoming in Sharon, the lily drooping in the valley, the apple-tree bowing under its fruit; the great rock shadowing a weary land, the river gladdening the dry place; the moon and the morning star; Carmel by the sea, and Tabor among the mountains; the dew from the womb of the morning, the rain upon the mown grass, the rainbow encompassing the landscape; the light, God's shadow; the thunder, His voice; the wind and the earthquake, His footsteps:— all such varied objects are made, as if naturally so designed from their creation, to represent Him to whom the Book and all its emblems point. Thus the quick spirit of the Book has ransacked creation to lay its treasures on Jehovah's altar, united the innumerable rays of a farstreaming glory on the little hill of Calvary, and woven a garland for the bleeding brow of Immanuel, the flowers of which have been culled from the gardens of a universe. George Gilfillan: Bards of the Bible.1 Behind him lay the gray Azores, Behind the Gates of Hercules; Before him not the ghost of shores, Before him only shoreless seas. The good mate said: "Now must we pray, 1 Taken from Espenshade's Forensic Declamations, pp. 59–60. Speak, Admiral, what shall I say?" 66 Why say, "My men grow mutinous day by day; My men grow ghastly wan and weak.' The stout mate thought of home; a spray Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. "What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, If we sight naught but seas at dawn? "Why, you shall say at break of day, 'Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!'' They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow, They sailed. They sailed. Then spoke the mate: "This mad sea shows its teeth to-night. He curls his lip, he lies in wait, With lifted teeth, as if to bite ! Brave Admiral, say but one good word: The words leapt as a leaping sword: Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck, It grew, a starlit flag unfurled! It Joaquin Miller: Columbus. 7. 3. Somber and reflective The lost days of my life until to-day, What were they, could I see them on the street Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet? I do not see them here; but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see, "I am thyself, — what hast thou done to me?" “And I — and I- thyself," (lo! each one saith,) "And thou thyself to all eternity!" Rossetti: Lost Days. It was night, and the rain fell; and, falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall lilies, and the rain fell upon my head — and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation. And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and ghastly, and tall - and the rock was gray. Upon its front were characters engraven in the stone; and I walked through the morass of water-lilies, until I came close unto the shore, that I might read the characters upon the stone. But I could not decipher them. And I was going back into the morass, when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rock, and upon the characters, and the characters were DESOLATION. And I looked upward, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. And the man 8. 9. was tall and stately in form, and was wrapped up from his shoulders to his feet in the toga of old Rome. And the outlines of his figure were indistinct but his features were the features of a deity; for the mantle of the night, and of the mist, and of the moon, and of the dew, had left uncovered the features of his face. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude. And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. He looked down into the low, unquiet shrubbery, and up into the tall primeval trees, and up higher at the rustling heaven, and into the crimson moon. And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock. ? Aumerle. Where is the duke my father with his power speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's, |