Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/93

 Rh high holiday. But at midnight there is a strange vision seen, at midnight a strange cry heard: across the dark waters flits a ship in flames, riding upright and still, shedding a wild and lurid fight around her, scaring the sea-birds from their nests, and making them dart and wheel with deafening screams—while above the wave uprises, ghastly white, a horse's head. "There, on the sea, he stands—the Spectre-Horse! He moves; he gains the sands," and onward speeds, his ghostly rides streaming with a cold blue light, his path shining like a swift ship's wake: onward speeds, till he reaches Lee's blasted threshold, and with neigh that seems the living trump of hell, summons the pirate to mount and away! But the hour of final vengeance is not yet come, and though Lee mounts the spirit-steed and is borne whither he would not> and sees into ocean depths where fie the sleeping dead, done to death by him; yet with the morning he is again quit of the apparition, and left to brood on his sins, and await the last scene of all—standing on the cliff, beneath the sun's broad fierce blaze, but himself "as stiff and cold as one that's dead"—lost in a dreamy trouble "of some wild honor past, and coming woes." Misery withers the caitiff's existence fer another year; and again the burning ship is seen, and the white steed visits him, and gives warning that the next visit shall be the last. Punctual and inexorable visitant!—he comes in his season, and in vain Lee flings and writhes in wild despair; "the spirit corse holds him by fearful spell;" a mystic fire

The legend is a telling one. And Mr. Dana has told it impressively. But in the hands of a more devoted romanticist it would have told much better. It is here a somewhat hard and bald composition—not unfrequently obscure from compression and elliptical treatment. The metre selected, too, requires for success a delicate and varied mastery of musical rhythm on the part of the poet, and some familiarity with its character on that of the reader. Some stanzas are excellent—others curt and rugged to a degree. Judging by the rest of his poems, Mr. Dana was oat of his element in this stern fancy-piece of legendary lore; and certainly, had we read the others first, we should have been surprised by the imaginative power he has brought to bear on a superstition of piracy and blood, involving the use of machinery from the spirit-world.

The brief introduction to the tragedy is quite in his happiest style, and breathes a melodious tranquillity aptiy chosen, by contrast to the advent agitation of struggling passion and savage discord. We see, in a few picturesque lines, a lonely island, all in silence, but for ocean's roar, and the fitful cry, heard through sparkling foam, of the shrill sea-bird: