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 gust 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,