| |
| VAGUE mystery hangs on all these desert places! | |
| The fear which hath no name hath wrought a spell! | |
| Strength, courage, wrath, have been, and left no traces! | |
| They came,—and fled; but whither? who can tell? | |
| |
| We know but that they were,—that once (in days | 5 |
| When ocean was a bar ’twixt man and man), | |
| Stout spirits wandered o’er these capes and bays, | |
| And perished, where these river-waters ran. | |
| |
| Methinks they should have built some mighty tomb, | |
| Whose granite might endure the century’s rain, | 10 |
| White winter, and the sharp night-winds that boom | |
| Like spirits in their purgatorial pain. | |
| |
| They left, ’t is said, their proud unburied bones | |
| To whiten on this unacknowledged shore; | |
| Yet naught besides the rocks and worn sea-stones | 15 |
| Now answers to the great Pacific’s roar! | |
| |
| A mountain stands where Agamemnon died: | |
| And Cheops hath derived eternal fame, | |
| Because he made his tomb a place of pride; | |
| And thus the dead Metella earned a name. | 20 |
| |
| But these,—they vanished as the lightnings die | |
| (Their mischiefs over) in the surging deep; | |
| And no one knoweth underneath the sky, | |
| What heroes perished here, nor where they sleep. | |
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