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

 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.