PREFACE.

In this Poem, the Author frankly acknowledges tliat In has so far failed, as to be under the necessity of sending it forth incomplete, or suppressing it altogether. Why he has not done the latter is of little importance to the public, which will assuredly award him no more credit than his performance, taken as it is, can command; while the consequences of his temerity, or his misfortune, must remain wholly with himself.

The original plan was intended to embrace the most prominent events in the annals of ancient and modern Greenland; incidental descriptions of whatever is sublime or picturesque in the seasons and scenery, or peculiar in the superstitions, manners, and character of tho natives; with a rapid retrospect of that moral revolution which the gospel has wrought among these people, by reclaiming them, almost universally from idolatry and barbarism.

Of that part of tho projected Poem which is here exhibited, the first three Cantos contain a sketch of tho history of the ancient Moravian Church, the origin of the missions by that people to Greenland, and the voyage of the first three Brethren who went thither in 1783. The fourth Canto refers principally to traditions concerning the Norwegian colonies, which are said to have existed on both shores of Greenland from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the fifth Canto the Author has attempted, in a series of episodes, to sum up and exemplify the chief causes of the extinction of those colonies, and the abandonment of Greenland, for several centuries, by European voyagers. Although this Canto is entirely a work of imagination, the fiction has not been adopted merely as a substitute for lost facts, but as a vehicle for illustrating many of the most splendid and striking phenomena of the climate, for which a more appropriate placo might not have been found, oven if the Poem had been carried on to a successful conclusion.

The principal subjects introduced in the. course of tha Poem will be found in Crantz's Histories of the Brethren, and of Greenland, or in Risler's Select Narratives, extracted from the records of the ancient Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren. To the accounts of Iceland by various travellers, the Author is also much indebted.

Sheffield, March 27,1819.

CANTO FIRST.

The three first Moravian Missionaries are represented as on their Voyage to Greenland, in the year 1733—Sketch of the descent, establishment, persecutions, extinction and revival of the Church of the United Brethren from the Tenth to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century— The Origin of their Missions to the West Indies and to Greenland.

The moon is watching in the sky; the stars

Are swiftly wheeling on their golden cars;

Ocean, outstretcht, with infinite expanse,

Serenely slumbers in a glorious trance:

The tide, o'er which no troubling spirits breathe,

Reflects a cloudless firmament beneath;

Where, poised as in the centre of a sphere,

A ship above and ship below appear;

A double image, pictured on the deep,

The vessel o'er its shadow seems to sleep;

Yet, like the host of heaven, that never rest,

With evanescent motion to the west,

The pageant glides through loneliness and night,

And leaves behind a rippling wake of light.

Hark ! through the calm and silence of the scene,
Slow, solemn, sweet, with many a pause between,
Celestial music swells along the air!
No; 'tis the evening hymn of praise and prayer
From yonder deck; where, on the stern retired
Three humble voyagers, with looks inspired,
And hearts enkindled with a holier flame
Than ever lit to empire or to fame,
Devoutly stand :—their choral accents rise
On wings of harmony beyon 1 the skies;

And 'midst the songs, that seraph-minstrels sing,

Day without night, to their immortal King,

These simple strains—which erst Bohemian hills

Echo'd to pathless woods and desert rills;

Now heard from Shetland's azure bound—are known

In heaven; and He, who sits upon the throne

In human form, with mediatorial power,

Remembers Calvary, and hails the hour,

When, by the Almighty Father's high decree,

The utmost north to Him shall bow the knee,

And, won by love, an untamed rebel-race

Kiss the victorious sceptre of His grace.

Then to His eye, whose instant glance pervades

Heaven's heights, earth's circle, hell's profoundest shades

Is there a group more lovely than those three

Night-watching pilgrims on the lonely sea?

Or to His ear, that gathers in one sound

The voices of adoring worlds around,

Comes there a breath of more delightful praise

Than the faint notes His poor disciples raise,

Ere on the treacherous main they sink to rest,

Secure, as leaning on their Master's breast?

They sleep; but memory wakes, and dreams array
Night in a lively masquerade of day;
The land they seek, the land they leave behind,
Meet on mid-ocean in the plastic mind;
One brings forsaken home and friends so nigh,
That tears in slumber swell the unconscious eye;
The other opens, with prophetic view,
Perils, which e'en their fathers never knew,
(Though school'd by suffering, long inured to toil,
Outcasts and exiles from their natal soil)—
Strange scenes, strange men; untold, untried distress;
Pain, hardships, famine, cold, and nakedness;
Diseases; death in every hideous form,
On shore, at sea, by fire, by flood, by storm;
Wild beasts and wilder men:—unmoved with fear,
Health, comfort, safety, life, they count not dear.

May they but hope a Saviour's love to show,
And warn one spirit from eternal woe!
Nor will they faint; nor can they strive in vain,
Since thus to live is Christ, to die is gain.

'Tis morn:—the bathing moon her lustre shrouds;
Wide o'er the east impends an arch of clouds,
That spans the ocean ;—while the infant dawn
Peeps through the portal o'er the liquid lawn,
That ruffled by an April gale appears,
Between the gloom and splendour of the spheres,
Dark-purple as the moorland-heath, when rain
Hangs in low vapours o'er the autumnal plain:
Till the full sun, resurgent from the flood,
Looks on the waves, and turns them into blood;
But quickly kindling, as his beams aspire,
The lambent billows play in forms of fire.
Where is the vessel 1—shining through the light,
Like the white sea-fowl's horizontal flight,
Yonder she wings, and skims, and cleaves her way,
Through refluent foam and iridescent spray.

Lo! on the deck, with patriarchal grace,
Heaven in his bosom opening o'er his face,
Stands Christian David—venerable name!
Bright in the records of celestial fame,
On earth obscure ;—like some sequester'd stai,
That rolls in its Creator's beams afar,
Unseen by man, till telescopic eye,
Sounding the blue abysses of the rky,
Draws forth its hidden beauty into light,
And adds a jewel to the crown of night.
Though hoary with the multitude of years,
Unshorn of strength, between his young compeers,
He towers: with faith, whose boundless glance can see
Time's shadows brightening through eternity;
Love,—God's own love in his pure breast enshrined;
Love,—love to man the magnet of his mind;
Sublimer schemes maturing in his thought
Than ever statesman plann'd or warrior wrought: