The Cape

On native soil, pushing yet southernward,
Where the gay sand-dunes color Wellfleet's brow,
And earlier some few years adventuring brave,
Old Gosnold struck the land, searching this way
For treasure; and despatched a company,
Who viewed off Truro's height the Atlantic wave
Far reaching down the east its purple shades,
Chasing the green with red, and the low moon
Trail her soft radiance o'er the glimmering sea.
Then, too, the unceasing music of the surf,
Heard in our waking dream, disturbs the air
Not merely with its sound, but that salt savor
Dear to inland minds. Brave Champlain earlier
Touched these golden sands, castles afar
Skirting the icy bay, then sped his flight
Across to Acadie; while Gosnold, lingering,
Found Naushawn, and Indian isles he gave
Eliza's name, where in the currents build
The coral insects, as on Omai's shore,
Their curving foliage for the gracile sea,
Warm from the Gulf Stream. Seeking here, he met
Groves built of sassafras, then filled his bark,
And sped an ocean flight. But Champlain bold
Tracked the great river, there where Cartier sailed,
Long ere those days, to Montmorenci's fall,
And where, o'er all the land, her piercing gaze,
Proud of her shining bulwarks, Quebec throws,
And eyes afar the trackless brush that sweeps
Its wilderness far north, where Baffin steered;
And near, the vast St. Lawrence, a deep tide
Coursing from inland seas than it more vast;
Waters like greenest gems of ocean mass
Compact, that proudly roll their emerald sheets
Over Niagara's edge; and farther down,
Below fair Orleans isle, the traveller seeks
Thy roar, St. Anne, hymn to the voyageur, —
Clad in primeval Thuyas, ghostly trees,
Where thy uncounted fall shakes the dark earth:
So Verrazani and Sebastian stern,
With brave Sir Humphrey, sailed our baffling shores.
Then, even to the lake that loves his name,
And holds the haughty Adirondacks glassed
Within its mirror, where the Iroquois,
A race sepulchral battling for their scalps,
Swept clean the war-path, Champlain fearless went.
Far greater than them all, that trusting soul,
The patient Genoese, whose name this land
Most fitly bore. How are they sped to nought! —
All save the Mayflower's children, or their race;
And, if not done, surviving in lean tribes
Haunting the Cordilleras and the Plain,
And such as 'neath Potosi dig the ore,
Or for their Cuban slave-pen fiercely strike.

If, now, a fable held, the legend old,
That gives the hardy Norse, seafaring men,
The true discovery of our rock-bound world,
And the strange name of Vineyard to the sound,
From Vinland and the Dane, perchance is truth.
So the first human craft seen on this coast,
A Biscay shallop with its crew, one clad
In seaman's costume and their copper pot,
That welcomed Gosnold on the Eastern shore,
Spake of another captain, other ship,
As sea-King Norse from Iceland's fords, whose words,
Household to us, flow in the English tongue.
What unknown ages, what crude centuries,
Since first New England's cape and that Blanche bay,
Our Massachusetts water, flowed with life!
Since first Cape Cod kept the tautog secure
From the cold ocean north his narrow stripe,
Or bade the crowd of shells south of his sands,
Never to pass that line; what eras past
Had the hot Gulf Stream, torn from Carib seas,
Rounded Nantucket's shore, and warmed the wave
That sweeps Fairhaven ere the trembling sloop,
Product of human labor, touched her strand!
And when shall ride a future deluge forth,
Back to the royal Proteus sweeping all?
Man questions deep in nature; but the plan,
Darkly significant of struggling chance,
Repeats the conflict of a rising world;
Ages where he did not participate,
With one-horned donkies and wing-fingered bats
Shuffled together, and the type obscured;
Lizards that flew; and armadilloes vast
Flopping in orchid-swamps, or dreaming out
Primeval leisures beneath tree-fern bowers.
Then came a page scrawled with hyena lines,
Species of bears and hairy elephants
Lumped at the pole, as if, prolific mind,
The generous mother never could enough.
In vain she crept, she flew at large, she crawled,
And sought to bridge the swamps by making peat,
Age after age, or sketched patterns of trees,
Pine after beech, and beeches after oak;
Beast following beast she tried, and nice
Condensed her shelly refuse into hills;
Then pushed the flashing quartz and granites red
Up the volcano's spout, or earthquake's scar.
Yet she succeeded crudely, striving on,
In this life-struggle for new living forms,
To mould superior creatures, and a globe
Better contrived for permanence to fill.
Vast was the stride from creatures without spine,
To upright columns, and a pivot crown,
The termination of the cord: here she rested;
Here she said, as 'twere, " The work is done.
Thus much my ages bring. " Yet beings stride
Ever to brighter regions, struggling through
The ranks of species to complexer form.
May not the winged prototypes be joined
To human structure, now too much embayed,
Collapsed in its own gravity, fixed to support,
Or hang upon the orb, a two-legged thing;
For slowly up, a downcast race, man trod:
Tried the gorilla rough and clumsy built,
Or, on all fours, protrusive crept about
Till times of principle evoked back-bone.
Years ere the Pilgrim Mayflower came and found
Those Plymouth treasures, Gosnold with his men,
As oft we say, landed on Wellfleet's sands;
And Brereton and Arthur crossed the cape
To scan the broad Atlantic, where to-day
The Beacon stands: the Highland light-upon
The clay-pit's brink, well should the sailor know,
Lest he confuse this Pharos with the next,
That stars its long Cape Race, or that more east,
With Nauset. Often have I dwelt content,
Pleased with the extending scene, and loved the man
Of genial nature and observant eye,
Who kept the light.
As old tradition lives
Along this coast, like those who came of old
(Danes or bold Norse), and named it Wonder Strand,
The men are fishers. Venturous their craft,
Quick-speeding schooners ploughing the blue main;
And rightly in its bud they named this shore, —
A silent hamlet sown on lonely sands,
Watered with widows' tears and children's sobs,
The fishers' home, — calling it Dangerfield.
And if the gale from George's in its wrath
Rolls o'er these passive fields, as if its power
Would sweep the humble houses off the land,
And make new barks of them to search the seas,
Well may the hamlet shudder in the gale.
That fatal line upon the graveyard sod,
That far amid the lonely wastes is set,
Where fifty souls out from this little flock,
Sunk in one fatal storm, buried alive, —
There in the mountains of the ingulfing wave,
Reads the dread lesson common on these hills!
Ask of your guide, who in the modest house
On that side lives, or this. Each house alike
Widow and children left to mourn the loss
Of him buried at sea. And nothing less,
Each fresh recurring season views the sails.
Bent forth, whiten the azure circumstance, —
The fleet just parting off for George's banks.
From that high cliff I looked o'er Truro's beach,
And saw beneath, the far unending strand
Coping with all the waves, and never wrecked.
There, too, town of the Province, built on sand,
Like Venice, lovely, sheltered in the wave,
With all its spires bright looming in the air,
When the mirage puts forth a playful arm,
And draws the smiling pageant through the haze.
Here first the pilgrim touched; he praised her soil;
He sung about her groves, like mariners
Hungry for inward pleasures, emerald green,
To whom the sward is heaven.
There's no place
I ever wandered in upon this earth,
Sweeter at sunset than the little vale
Crossing above the lighthouse, where is seen
No trace of human dwelling, nor a track
Scooped by the toilsome wagon in those sands;
So still, so fragrant with the fresh sea-air
Caught from the beach. The broad-leaved golden-rod;
And grass ill-named of poverty; and that plant,
The perfumed Mayflower, with the long beach-grass;
And copses blushing all of bright wild rose, —
Enhance the scene; and the soft sparrow's note
Comes from the ground, so well Savanna named,
As if her song in that pure element,
Blest in seclusion, welled up from the herb,
One with the peaceful cricket's twilight strains.
Yet ever haunts the ear a hush of sounds,
Making the silence sweeter; and how soon,
(If your adventurous foot demand,
And standing on the verge) you see beneath,
The sparkling lines of ever-rolling surf,
On the patient sand crashing their cannon! —
The glistening sprays torn off the breaking waves,
Bright lights and changeful greens, and floating wrack,
And that unwearying breeze. Oh! yet withdraw,
And in sweet contrast find the silence deep,
As if the pulses of the earth were stilled
Beyond the power of thought, or dream to speak,
Communing with the spirit of the sea,
Most like the mountain's voice when evening greets
You, silent, on his cliffs.
And often came
To this consoling valley one whose bloom
Partly had faded off a cheek of rose,
When not yet twenty summers for her form
Had wound their wreaths of beauty. She had known
The city's culture, nursed by ceaseless love,
And that devoted heart to mothers lent,
And unto them alone. But oft her thoughts,
In the proud mansion on the city street,
Strewed with the loans of luxury that time
Wafts down o'erpowering from the burdened past,
Wandered to this seclusion. And she saw
The rolling wave tossing its sand and shells;
The shining pebbles murmuring at her feet,
And felt the breath of the pure living waters
Thrill her reviving frame. Her song she raised:
" Oh, I would be a daughter of the sea!
On the dull land I feel the death of life,
That bars away my soul from all I love,
Where sleeps the heart I never thought to lose.
The open air, the bright and cheerful day,
Bringing my frame their reasonable toil, —
They make repose, seem joy. But in these streets,
On custom pensioned, and constraint in form,
My thoughts feel feverish as an imprisoned bird
Against life's narrow bars, — narrow and steeled.
Oh, I would be a daughter of the sea!
To list its ceaseless song, and think no more
Of all this weary and incessant shore;
Hiding a breaking heart behind a mask
Made of conspicuous trifles, pointed fine,
And wounding to the last. Afar my boat
Should ride the foaming distance, as the prow
Tossed off the whitening rancor of the wave,
And let the breeze blow free, and my wild speed
Shall emulate its own. "
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