English

THE SHORE-MEN

The night is dark; the morning still is distant;
Silent are the cottages near the cove;
Suddenly a window in a gable is lighted —
Another and another! the village is awake!

One by one the low side-doors are opened
And, like conspirators, dim forms emerge;
It is the fishermen who are early faring
To drop their lines, pull nets, set trawls.

They go silently with slow deliberate motion

GAME SLAVERY ALSO

When the Mayflower steering westward heard the Stormwind's wild ha! ha!
Westward sailed another vessel from the coast of Africa,
Bearing as its living cargo Negroes for Virginia.

Torn from kraals neath slender palm-trees, where the jungled Tropics burn,
Naked, terror-speechless, they were fated never to return,
Whether sold as slaves or flung half-dying to the sharks astern.

Men and women, shackled, herded, in the filthy noisome hold,

M AYFLOWER! Mayflower! Where didst thou vanish?
Borne on what gale didst thou breast the wild seas?
Wert thou destroyed by the guns of the Spanish?
Or wert thou wrecked on the bleak Hebrides?
Or, having finished thy voyages allotted,
Rest didst thou find in a kelp-tangled grave,
Gnawed by teredos, old, broken and rotted,
Dropping away in the tide's glaucous wave?

Wert thou engulft in the shoals of Cape Sable,

How deep-laid was the foundation
Of the Pilgrims education!
First the meeting-house was built,
Lest the plant of Grace should wilt.
There the learned Cushing expounded
In long periods logic-rounded,
And the listeners were warmed
By the terrors at them stormed,
Though the powdery snow was sifted
Through the cracks and round them drifted
And their quickened breath congealed.

Those from whom we boast descent,
In whose name we found societies,
Raise the massive monument,
Praise the prim and primitive pieties,
Whom we fain would emulate
In their grand granitic qualities,
Whom we patronize as great
(We, whose lives are half frivolities) —
Should those ancestors austere
Gabriel's trump anticipate,
And before our gates appear,
Where we feast and dissipate,

" CHILDREN , " some old man would say,
" I shall not forget the day
When we first caught sight of land,
Oh how eagerly we scanned
Every hillock, every tree,
Skirting near enough to see,
Wondering what the shore contained,
One whole night a man remained
In a shelter that we made
There at Eastham where we stayed
Studying the oceanside,
There the first Indian we espied,
Would you know how he was drest?
On his head an eagle's crest;
On his cheekbones, high and dark,
Livid ran the mystic mark

Of the Mayflower-Pilgrims those
That were spared by illness, foes,
Cold, privations, until Age
Turned and filled life's final page;
Sitting by the winter's fire
Blazing high, would never tire
Of recalling the past days
And the labyrinthine ways
Through which God had guided them
To their new Jerusalem.

Two or three old men would meet
In quaint Plymouth's crooked street,
One would say: " Dost thou remember
How, that Monday in November,
Sixty years ago, we landed
On the Cape? The pinnace stranded

SONG OF THE PHoeNICIAN EMIGRANTS

Sing to the praise of our gods,
Sing unto Baal and Ashtaroth —
Baal whose mighty right hand
Hurls the red hurtling thunderbolts;
Ashtaroth, kindler of hope,
Queen of the heaven of holiness.
Give us your aid in our need,
Guard us, preserve us, go forth with us!

Infinite God of the Sea,
Leasher of wild-roaring hurricanes,

JOHN MILTON was a boy then, with long locks
Which shaded his as yet unclouded eyes,
Doomed to be blinded by too daring gaze —
Rapt gaze, heav'n-turned toward God's effulgent throne;
A boy of twelve, with serious beautiful face,
With promise of rare genius, who should sing
The epic of God's dealings with mankind —
Creation, Paradise, Sin, Punishment,
The battles of the Cherubim, and Hell —
The great blind Puritan poet-laureate.
Oh would that he had in sonorous verse
Enshrined the Mayflower compact for all time!

I

After months of weary laboring through the endless ocean swells,
Where nor sky nor circling sea-rim of the land so longed for tells,
Where not once a blur of canvas, near or distant, ever spells

Messages of human kinship, rival voyage or homeward run;
And the eye can mark no progress, not an ell of sea-room won,
Where the heaving waste is storm-wracked or a-glitter with the sun,

Living only in white billows curled by blasts of viewless gales,