Fed from the fountain near th' 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 turned,—
Their love to Christ beyond the Atlantic burned.
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.12
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'erjoyed to find
His own idea in his brother's mind.
For counsel in simplicity they prayed,
And vows of ardent consecration made;-
Vows heard in heaven: from that accepted hour
Their souls were clothed with confidence and power,13
Nor hope deferred could quell their heart's 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 enrolled;
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 sealed instructions sent,
They went in faith (as childless Abram went
To dwell by suff'rance 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 appeared, 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 't was enough for them to know--
The still small voice that whispered 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 the 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 unfurled,
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!
Hopes and fears-The Brethren pursue their voyage-À 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 fixed 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 hylcyon 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 :
Moored 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."
'T was 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 everywhere 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 impelled, 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 sojourned 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 vanished; every fear resigned;
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, stretched 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 renewed ;
At once a thousand kind emotions start,
And the blood warms and mantles round the heart!
O'er the ship's lea, 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 assailed,
Wedged with ice-mountains, here had fought and failed;
Perished,—and, in the petrifying blast,
His hulk became an island rooted fast :14
Rather, from Ocean's dark foundation hurled,
Thou art a type of his mysterious world,
Buoyed 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 carcase 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 notc,**
Fate's ministers, in livid vapours float.
Far off, amidst the placid sunshine, glow
Mountains with hearts of fire and crests of snow,
Whose blackened slopes with deep ravines entrenched,
Their thunders silenced, and their lightnings quenched,
Still the slow heat of spent eruptions breathe,
While embryo earthquakes swell their wombs beneath.
* Hecla is said to be haunted by evil spirits in the shape of birds.
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