Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/155

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Cold, cold as death! the sky so bleak
That even daylight seems to shiver;
And, starting back from icy peak,
The blinking sunbeams quail and quiver.

They smile, those lonely, patient men,
Though gladness mocks that scene so drear;
They speak — yet words are spent in vain
Which seem to freeze upon the ear.

Mountains on hoary mountains high,
O’ertop the sea-bird’s loftiest flight;
All bleak the air — all bleached the sky —
The pent-up, stiffened sea, all white.

Amid the fearful stillness round,
Scarce broken by the wind’s faint breezing,
Hist! heard ye not that crackling sound?
That death-watch click — the sea is freezing.

They breathe not — speak not — murmur not;
But in each other’s face they gaze,
While memory, fancy, tender thought,
Turn sadly back to other days.

Long years roll by in that wild dream —
Long years of mingled joy and pain;
But like a meteor’s erring gleam,
’Tis gone — there stands the ice again.

The ice, the piles of ice, arrayed
In forms of awful grandeur still;
But all their terrors, how they fade
Before proud man’s sublimer will!

With straining oars and bending spars,
They dash their icy chains asunder;
Force frozen doors — burst crystal bars —
And drive the sparkling fragments under.