Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/86

54  Once again the spectral horror moved the guarded wall about; Once again the levelled muskets through the palisades flashed out, With that deadly aim the squirrel on his tree-top might not shun, Nor the beach-bird seaward flying with his slant wing to the sun.

Like the idle rain of summer sped the harmless shower of lead. With a laugh of fierce derision, once again the phantoms fled; Once again, without a shadow on the sands the moonlight lay, And the white smoke curling through it drifted slowly down the bay!

“God preserve us!” said the captain; “never mortal foes were there; They have vanished with their leader, Prince and Power of the air! Lay aside your useless weapons; skill and prowess naught avail; They who do the Devil’s service wear their master’s coat of mail!”

So the night grew near to cock-crow, when again a warning call Roused the score of weary soldiers watching round the dusky hall: And they looked to flint and priming, and they longed for break of day; But the captain closed his Bible: “Let us cease from man, and pray!”

To the men who went before us, all the unseen powers seemed near, And their steadfast strength of courage struck its roots in holy fear. Every hand forsook the musket, every head was bowed and bare, Every stout knee pressed the flag-stones, as the captain led in prayer.

Ceased thereat the mystic marching of the spectres round the wall, But a sound abhorred, unearthly, smote the ears and hearts of all,— Howls of rage and shrieks of anguish! Never after mortal man Saw the ghostly leaguers marching round the block-house of Cape Ann.

So to us who walk in summer through the cool and sea-blown town, From the childhood of its people comes the solemn legend down. Not in vain the ancient fiction, in whose moral lives the youth And the fitness and the freshness of an undecaying truth.

Soon or late to all our dwellings come the spectres of the mind, Doubts and fears and dread forebodings, in the darkness undefined; Round us throng the grim projections of the heart and of the brain, And our pride of strength is weakness, and the cunning hand is vain.

In the dark we cry like children; and no answer from on high Breaks the crystal spheres of silence, and no white wings downward fly; But the heavenly help we pray for comes to faith, and not to sight, And our prayers themselves drive backward all the spirits of the night!

of Herbipolis, one day, While kneeling at the altar’s foot to pray Alone with God, as was his pious choice, Heard from without a miserable voice, A sound which seemed of all sad things to tell, As of a lost soul crying out of hell.

Thereat the Abbot paused; the chain whereby His thoughts went upward broken by that cry; And, looking from the casement, saw below A wretched woman, with gray hair a-flow, And withered hands held up to him, who cried For alms as one who might not be denied.

She cried, “For the dear love of Him who gave His life for ours, my child from bondage save,— My beautiful, brave first-born, chained with slaves In the Moor’s galley, where the sun-smit waves Lap the white walls of Tunis!”—“What I can