The distant ice-blink's spangled diadem;
Like a new morn from orient darkness, there
Phosphoric splendour's 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,
Through all the colours 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 furi'd; the anchor drags the sand;
The boat hath cross'd the creek;—the Brethren land.

180

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CANTO FOURTH.

Retrospect of Ancient Greenland—The Discovery of Iceland, of Greenland,
of Wineland—The Norwegian Colonies on the Eastern and Western
Coasts of Greenland—The appearance of the Skraellings, or Modern
Grcenlanders, in the West, and the destruction of the Norwegian Settlers
in that quarter.

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;"

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^ 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 tho western beam,
Beneath the burning line made fountains start
In the dry wilderness of Afric's heart,

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 father's 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.
'Twas Liberty, that fires the coldest veins,
And exile, famine, death, prefers to chains;
'Twas Liberty, through floods unplough'd before,
That led his gallant crew from Norway's shore;
They cut their cable, and in thunder broke,
With their departing oars, the tyrant's yoke;
The deep their country, and their bark their home,
A floating isle, on which they joy'd to roam
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 sailed those mariners, unheeding where
They found a port, if Freedom anchor'd there.

By stars that never set, their course they steer'd,
And northward with indignant impulse veer'd
For sloth had Ml'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.
Pleasefl with the proud discovery, Ingolf gave
His lintel and his door-posts to the wave,
Divining, as they drifted to the strand,
The will of destiny,—the place to land.
There, on a homeless soil, his foot he placed,
Framed his hut-palace, colonized the waste,
And ruled his horde with patriarchal sway;
—Where justice reigns, 'tis 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