Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/160

128  The out-thrust headlands and inreaching bays Of our northeastern coast-line, trending where The Gulf, midsummer, feels the chill blockade Of icebergs stranded at its northern gate.

To thee the echoes of the Island Sound Answer not vainly, nor in vain the moan Of the South Breaker prophesying storm. And thou hast listened, like myself, to men Sea-periled oft where Anticosti lies Like a fell spider in its web of fog, Or where the Grand Bank shallows with the wrecks Of sunken fishers, and to whom strange isles And frost-rimmed bays and trading stations seem Familiar as Great Neck and Kettle Cove, Nubble and Boon, the common names of home. So let me offer thee this lay of mine, Simple and homely, lacking much thy play Of color and of fancy. If its theme And treatment seem to thee befitting youth Rather than age, let this be my excuse: It has beguiled some heavy hours and called Some pleasant memories up; and, better still, Occasion lent me for a kindly word To one who is my neighbor and my friend.

The skipper sailed out of the harbor mouth, Leaving the apple-bloom of the South
 * For the ice of the Eastern seas,
 * In his fishing schooner Breeze.

Handsome and brave and young was he, And the maids of Newbury sighed to see
 * His lessening white sail fall
 * Under the sea’s blue wall.

Through the Northern Gulf and the misty screen Of the isles of Mingan and Madeleine,
 * St. Paul’s and Blanc Sablon,
 * The little Breeze sailed on,

Backward and forward, along the shore Of lorn and desolate Labrador,
 * And found at last her way
 * To the Seven Islands Bay.

The little hamlet, nestling below Great hills white with lingering snow,
 * With its tin-roofed chapel stood
 * Half hid in the dwarf spruce wood;

Green-turfed, flower-sown, the last outpost Of summer upon the dreary coast,
 * With its gardens small and spare,

Sad in the frosty air.

Hard by where the skipper’s schooner lay, A fisherman’s cottage looked away
 * Over isle and bay, and behind
 * On mountains dim-defined.

And there twin sisters, fair and young, Laughed with their stranger guest, and sung
 * In their native tongue the lays
 * Of the old Provençal days.

Alike were they, save the faint outline Of a scar on Suzette’s forehead fine;
 * And both, it so befell,
 * Loved the heretic stranger well.

Both were pleasant to look upon, But the heart of the skipper clave to one;
 * Though less by his eye than heart
 * He knew the twain apart.

Despite of alien race and creed, Well did his wooing of Marguerite speed;
 * And the mother’s wrath was vain
 * As the sister’s jealous pain.

The shrill-tongued mistress her house forbade, And solemn warning was sternly said
 * By the black-robed priest, whose word
 * As law the hamlet heard.

But half by voice and half by signs The skipper said, “A warm sun shines
 * On the green-banked Merrimac;
 * Wait, watch, till I come back.

“And when you see, from my mast head, The signal fly of a kerchief red,
 * My boat on the shore shall wait;
 * Come, when the night is late.”

Ah! weighed with childhood’s haunts and friends, And all that the home sky overbends,