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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, belaboring sticks, and cries
Repel the errant Demon to the skies.

The sun hath cast aside his veil ;-he shines
With purest splendor till his orb declines;
Then landward, marshalling in black array,
Eruptive vapors 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:

light who was her tormentor; and thus the dusky spots on the moon had their origin; for she, struggling to escape, slipped out of his arms, soared aloft, and became the sun. He followed up into the firmament, and was transformed into the moon; but as he has never been able to rise so high as she, he con

tinues running after her, with the vain hope of overtaking her. When he is tired and hungry, in his last quarter, he sets out from his house a seal-hunting, on a sledge drawn by four great dogs, and stays several days abroad to recruit and fatten; and this produces the full moon. He rejoices when the women die, and Malina, in revenge, rejoices when the men die: therefore the men keep at home during an eclipse of the sun, and the women during an eclipse of the moon. When he is in eclipse, Aninga prowls about the dwellings of the Greenlanders, to plague the females, and steal provisions and skins, nay even to kill those persons who have not duly observed the laws of temperance. At these times they hide their most precious goods; and the men carry kettles and chests to the tops of their houses, and rattle upon them with cudgels to frighten away the moon, and make him return to his place in the sky. During an eclipse of the sun, the men skulk in terror into the darkest corners, while the women pinch the ears of their dogs; and if these cry out, it is a sure omen that the end of the world is not yet come; 1 The Greenlanders believe that the sun and moon are sister for as dogs existed before men, according to Greenland logic, and brother. They, with other children, were once playing to- they must have a quicker foresight into futurity. Should the gether in the dark, when Aninga behaving rudely to his sister dogs be mute (which of course they never are, under such ill Malina, she rubbed her hands in the soot about the extinguished treatment), then the dissolution of all things must be at hand. lamp, and smeared his face, that she might discover by day--See Crantz.

243

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 paralyzing 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 downright,
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 delirous night the waking dream,
The mariners in vain their labors 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 th' 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 plank 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, Th' 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 bew 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 splendors 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,

1 The term Ice-Blink is generally applied by our mariners to the nocturnal illumination in the heavens, which denotes to them the proximity of ice mountains. In this place a description is attempted of the most stupendous accumulation of ice in the known world, which has been long distinguished by this peculiar name by the Danish navigators.

Through all the colors 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 IV.

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. "T was Liberty, that fires the coldest veins, Retrospect of ancient Greenland :-The discovery And exile, famine, death, prefers to chains; of Iceland, of Greenland, of Wineland.-The "T was Liberty, through floods unplow'd before, Norwegian colonies on the eastern and western That led his gallant crew from Norway's shore; coasts of Greenland; the appearance of the Skrael-They cut their cable, and in thunder broke, lings, or modern Greenlanders, in the west, and With their departing oars, the tyrant's yoke; the destruction of the Norwegian settlers in that The deep their country, and their bark their home, A floating isle, on which they joy'd to roam quarter. 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.

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;"1
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,

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 door-posts to the wave,

1 Among numerous incoherent traditions, it is recorded, that Iceland was first discovered by one Flokko, a pirate, who being bewildered at sea, let fly (as was the custom of the Norwegians in such extremities) a raven, which, soaring to a great elevation, discerned land, and made for it. Flokko followed, and arriving at a mountainous coast covered with snow and 1 About the middle of the seventeenth century, an oar was glaciers, called it Iceland. Some time afterwards, about the drifted on the coast of Iceland, bearing this inscription in Ru-year 874, Ingolf, a Norwegian earl, with his vassals, escaping

nic characters:

Oft var ek dasa, dur ek dro thik.

"Oft was I weary when I drew thee." This oar was conjectured to have been brought from East Greenland, a hundred and fifty years after the last ship sailed from Norway for

that coast.

from the tyranny of Harold Harfugar, pursued the same course as Flokko, and, by the same experiment with a raven, discovered Iceland; which he and his followers peopled, and there he established a commonwealth that reflected honor on an age of barbarism.

245

Divining as they drifted to the strand
The will of destiny,-the place to land. '
There on a homeless soil his foot he placed,
Beamed his hut-palace, colonized the waste,
And ruled his horde with patriarchal sway;
-Where justice reigns, 't is 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 th' 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. 2

"T were 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's 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;
1 This device of superstition is borrowed from the tradition
concerning Ingolf, and probably the same was frequently em-
ployed by the northern rovers, leaving their native country,
and seeking a home in strange lands.

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 virgin throned in the west:"1
-Greenland's bold sons, by instinct, sallied forth
On barks, like ice-bergs 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,

1 Spenser introduces Prince Arthur as traversing the world in search of his mistress Gloriana, whom he had only seen in a dream. The discovery of a region in the west, by the Greenland Norwegians, about the year 1000, and intercourse maintained with it for 120 years afterwards, may be considered as the most curious fact or fable connected with the history of theso colonists. The reason why it was called Wineland, is given in the sequel.

An Icelander, named Bioern, in the year 1001, following his father, who had emigrated to Greenland, is said to have been driven by a storm to the south-west, where he discovered a fine champaign country covered with forests. He did not tarry long there, but made the best of his way back again, northeast, for Greenland, which he reached in safety. The tidings of his adventure being rumored abroad there, one Leif the son of Eric the Red, a famous navigator, being ambitious of aequiring fame by discovering and planting new lands, fitted out a vessel, with thirty-five men, and sailed with Bioern on board, in search of the south-west country. They arrived, in due time, at a low woody coast, and sailed up a river to a spacious lake, which communicated by it with the sea. The soil was salmon, and the climate was mild. Leif and his party winterexceeding fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, particularly

ed there, and observed that on the shortest day the sun rose about eight o'clock, which may correspond with the fortyninth degree of latitude, and denotes the situation of Newfoundland, or the river St. Lawrence in Canada.-When they had built their huts, after landing, they one day missed a German mariner named Tyrker, whom, after a long search, they found in the woods, dancing with delight. On being asked what made him so merry, he answered, that he had been eating such grapes of which wine was made in his native country. When Leif saw and tasted the fruit himself, he called the new region Vünland, or Wineland. Crantz, who gives this account, on various authorities, adds in a note, that "well flavored wild grapes are known to grow in the forests of Canada, but no good wine has been produced from them. "—After the return of Leif to Greenland, many voyages were undertaken to Wineland, and some colonies established there. One Thorfin, an Icelander, who had married a Greenland beiress, Gudrid, the widow of the third son of Eric the Red, by whom 2 The extravagant accounts of the fertility of ancient Green-he obtained the inheritance of Wineland, ventured thither land need not be particularized here. Some of the annals with sixty-five men and five women; taking cattle and implestate, that the best wheat grew to perfection in the valleys; ments of husbandry with them, for the purpose of building that the forests were extensive and luxuriant; flocks and herds and planting. The natives (probably the Esquimaux) found were numerous, and very large and fat, etc. At St. Thomas's them thus settled, and were glad to barter with their furs and Cloister, there was a natural fountain of hot water (a geyser) skins in exchange for iron instruments, etc. One of these bar which, being conveyed by pipes into all the apartments of the barians, however, having stolen an ax, was dolt enough to monks, ministered to their comfort in many ways. Adjoining try its edge on his companion's skull, which cost the poor this cloister there was a richly cultivated garden, through wretch his life; whereupon a third, wiser than either, threw which a warm rivulet flowed, and rendered the soil so fertile, the murderous weapon into the sea.-Commerce with Winethat it produced the most beautiful flowers, and the most deli- land is reported to have been carried on for upwards of an hundred years afterwards.

cious fruits.

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 savannas, 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 leapt 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 green-wood 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 fullness 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), harmonized 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

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 colonizing 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;

Look'd through a tear-she reach'd him with a sigh: Elsewhere they wandered; here they lived and died.

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 un-
known,

We hear the speech or music of our own,
Roused to delight from drear abstraction start,
And feel our country beating at our heart;

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;
Slipp'd from the secret hand of Providence,
They come we see not how, nor know we whence."

1 The ancestors of the modern inhabitants first appeared on

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