Читать книгу Poems - John L. Stoddard - Страница 20

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Here ends at last the Inland Sea!

Still seems its outlet, as of yore,

The anteroom of Mystery,

As, through its westward-facing door,

I see the vast Atlantic lie

In splendor 'neath a sunset sky.

Above its distant, glittering rim

Streams o'er the waves a flood of gold,

To gild the mountains, bare and grim,

Which guard this exit, as of old—

The sombre sentries of two seas,

The Pillars reared by Hercules;—

Gibraltar—on the northern shore,

By conquering Moors once proudly trod—

And, to the south a league or more,

Huge Abyla, the "Mount of God",

Whence burdened Atlas watched with ease

The Gardens of Hesperides.

How many slow-paced centuries passed,

Before brave sailors dared to creep

Beyond the gloom these monsters cast,

And venture on the unknown deep,

At last resolving to defy

The "God-established" termini!

Yet no fierce gods opposed their path;

No lurid bolt or arrow sped

To crush them with celestial wrath,

And number them among the dead;

The dreadful Pillars proved as tame

As other rocks of lesser fame.

Hence, when before them stretched the sea,

Majestic, limitless and clear,

A rapturous sense of being free

Dispelled all vestiges of fear

The longed-for ocean to explore

From pole to pole, from shore to shore.

Thus all men learn the God they dread

Is kinder than they had supposed,

And that, not God, but Man hath said—

"The door to freedom must be closed!"

Once past that door, with broadened view,

They find Him better than they knew.

Meanwhile, along the sunlit strait

My ship glides toward the saffron west,

Beyond the old Phenician gate

To ocean's gently heaving breast,

Whence, on the ever-freshening breeze,

There greet my spirit words like these;—

Sail bravely on! the morning light

Shall find thee far beyond the land;

Gibraltar's battlemented height

And Afric's tawny hills of sand

Shall soon completely sink from view

Beneath the ocean's belt of blue.

Sail on! nor heed the shadows vast

Of fabled Powers, whose fear enslaves!

Their spectral shapes shall sink at last

Below the night's abandoned waves;

Rest not confined by shoals and bars;

Steer oceanward by God's fixed stars!