Roden Noel

“ To embrace fair Philæ, Philæ, fairest isle
Of all earth's islands! fringed with mirror'd palm,
And lotos blossom on the crystalline
Laving her bosom; she hath lotos blossom
For capitals of her hypæthral fane,
Quiet in heaven, tremulous in the river:
Where, sundering flowing phantoms of the stars,
Boats glide by night, aslant on broider'd sail,
Freighted with youth, and love and loveliness:
Balmy night breezes, all alive with song,
Laughter, and rhythmic plashing of light oars,
(While coloured lamp-lights lambent on the ripple
Stream from fair vessel, or embower'd shore) ”

“ These labour-roughen'd hands have builded it.
Nor for myself alone, but for the dark
Children of whom I am the father here,
I labour with strong hand, and heart, and soul.
I smelt rude ores; and, fervid as large eyes
Of wrathful tigers, ringing iron yields
Upon mine anvil, hammer'd heartily;
While a bow'd native plies the goatskin bellows.
Lusty and hale, in manhood's vigorous prime,
I startle the lone woods with stalwart blows;
While cream-white splinters fly from stubborn trunks,
Whose leafy pride falls headlong shattering ”

“ To me I confess it appears that Past and Present are equally poetical, when regarded and treated by a poet—equally unpoetical when regarded and treated by a mere versifier—though I am far from saying that every particular time is fully as poetical as any other. But the present time seems by no means deficient in that respect. No age is heroic to its valet-de-chambre; and every age has many valets-de-chambre. ”

“ And fibres of a leaf; weave grassy cloths
In looms, or spin with immemorial spindle.
Some men have gone with quiver, targe, and spear,
To hunt the beast for food; some loll at ease,
Like their own gourds, luxuriously idle;
Listless and vacant dumb black animals,
Who spurn the accursèd joke of thought and toil—
They never roll the stone of Sisyphus!
No fool's ambition ever goads their lives
To rouse a restless rumour, while they roll
Into fate's mortal darkness, and to leave
A hollow murmur for a little time
In some poor space of insignificant earth! ”

“ The slave may kneel; but only kneel to God!
Thou, gallant Stanley, scorning toil, alert,
Stern battling with thy formidable foes,
Hast won the brilliant prize; and Europe turn
Her enviously grateful eyes on thee!
⁠The outer world supposed the traveller dead.
But Murchison, and some true friends beside,
In England, as beyond the sundering sea,
Firm in sagacions confidence, divined
His living need, and sent strong hearts to help.
Young, namesake of a faithful friend at home,21
Finds all the falsehood of a traitor's tale:
But Stanley finds the murder'd man alive! ”

“ Her guilty sail; while evil strangers brand
Dark women on a golden strand with fire;
Who are mute with endless woes unutterable!
⁠Nay! the long wail of wounded innocence
Hath ne'er been squander'd on a voiceless Void!
But every tear of every helpless child
Sinks in a warm unfathomable Love:
And armèd Righteousness awaits her hour,
Albeit Her lightning slumber in the cloud.
These human shambles shall be purged from blood:
This charnel of the world shall reek no more,
Plague-spot of all the starry universe! ”

“ Ordeal poison from a gourden bowl,
And, struggling piteous to reverse the doom
Of her young murder, reels, and sinks, and falls;
A hundred daggers mangling her fair life. . . . .
Do these not need the Gospel of the Lord?
⁠Therefore I press right onward to my goal:
Nor only for an hour, a month, a year;
But while life lasts, a warrior to the end,
I wrest from Fortune all she would withhold. ”

“ Tortures a feeble lowly-witted race,
Poor fallen outcast of humanity;
Inflames the lurking salvage brute that haunts
A wilding blood to fratricidal war,
To thrall its very kindred, for the sport
Of paler large-brain'd fiends, the common foe,
And glut their markets with the flesh of men.
Shoot them and drown them! from convulsive arms
Tear small sweet clinging babes, and fainting brides
From lovers, who with unavailing life
Stain them in falling, or themselves enslaved,
Yoked, goaded, pinioned, tramp the burning wilds,
To bleach with beast-gnawn bones the wilderness ”

“ Fragments of torn soil'd paper, strewn around,
Show notes of travel jotted on the way
With his own red blood, used in place of ink.
A notebook, and a Bible, lie beside;
With sextant, and chronometer, and hides;
Ivory, tusks, a rifle, a javelin.
⁠Hark! the tranquillity of burning noon
A distant shot disturbs!—and now another!
Men rouse them—what is it? another shot!
It must be some approaching caravan.
Shall they awake the Master? Nay, he hears:
He is awake, and, listening, wonders too;
Hoping, and fearing; communing with God. ”

“ Quail'd and rebell'd—let him but struggle home!
Homeward they hasten—life ebbing apace.
And first he rides; but soon they carry him.
So when they have arrived at Muilala,
He bows the head—"A hut where I may die!"
⁠Now all the mists of death pass over him:
Terrible pain, ill dreams; with longings vain
For one glimpse of a loving face afar.
It is the hour of mortal agony.
Watchman! will the terrible night soon pass? ”

“ Whose shores are blushing corallines most rare,
Where ocean-fairies wander mailed in gems,
Silently gliding through the branching bowers
While far inland strange palaces are piled
Profusely with pure ivory and gold—3
No lynx-eyed peril-affronting pioneer,
Since the beginning, until yesterday,
Dared violate thy sultry somnolence,
Couch'd, a grim lion in thine ancient lair;
Sullenly self-involved, impenetrable! ”

“ Of over-frowning mountain-presences
With stealthily mysterious forms aware.
A bitter, long, monotonous human wail!
More poignant than the cries of animal lives
In unreverberate torture; 'tis a wail
Of one that's cloven to the depths of being,
Maim'd in the vitals of an immortal soul.
To me it seems alive with the wild prayer,
This poor blind people hath so oft preferr'd,
Crying with dumb yet infinite eloquence,
"O wise white man! we pray thee give us sleep!" ”

“ A dirge world-weary, an old-world requiem,
Trailing a slow wan length along the dust,
Faint from the fount of immemorial tears;
A shadow, whose maim'd wings are plumed with awe;
Sunken so deep from ghostly woes and fears,
And broken hearts of all ancestral lives;
Phantoms aroused by a fresh living pain
To haunt the labyrinths of a living soul,
And all the dark slow movement of the dirge!
⁠One cabin stands a little way apart
From all the rest upon a higher ground.
Hence flows the wail! A man laments his son. ”

“ But his chief concern—though he takes a very humane and broad interest in all—is the future of the people, among whom he has so long lived: he is a profoundly sincere Christian missionary—a philanthropist in the best and widest sense—with heart bleeding for all the ignorance, darkness, and misery, which he sees around him; thirsting to devise the best possible means for the salvation, enlightenment, and civilization of the races. ”

“ Large-brain'd, blood-thirstiest of the infernal crew,
Six human victims hath the wizard slain,
Ere, man once more, the avengers torture him,
Avowing with bitter tears the sorcery. . . . .
Then many a negro, shivering, glances round,
Timidly peering into forest gloom;
They pile more wood; sitting in silence, till
Another adds his marvel to the store.
⁠Is it all fable? is it all illusion?
Nay, doth not our most awful Universe
Lead poor, mad mortals to the wilds alone,
Into a barren wilderness of souls ”

“ Seeks those immortals, who have passed away
From earth to yonder infinite star-worlds:
World within world, sun, planet, comet, moon,
All in their order and their own degree,
One crimson, and one golden, and one green,
Harmonious hearing a low voice of Love! ”

“ While ever and anon an ebony bird
Rouses from his dim dreaming on the sand,
And screaming harshly, wakes a long wild cry
From some fish-eagle, widening vast brown wings.
In shoals grave marabouts, with red flamingoes,
Wade; and behold! ”

“ Hover'd and slanted, dipp'd his breast in brine.
Exulting in the wind and turbulent foam;
While half the mortal languor left my limbs,
And I rejoiced with him. From sea to sea!
I traversed all the dark, blank continent;
And proved it not, as timid idle dream
Surmised, an evil waste unprofitable,
Huge blot on God's most bountiful, fair world ”

“ In life, in death, She claims to hold his heart!
. . . Hath he not died in her own awful arms?
His sons and daughters in deep sable robed
Bear large white wreaths of blossom for his grave:
Yea, dark Death lies all buried and conceal'd
Under sweet emblems of immortal life! ”

“ Reeking with bats, and owls, and doleful things,
High among crags of a precipitous mountain,
Strewn with fresh bones of men, that hideous ghouls
In human form, foul anthropophagi,
Have gnawn for food; a loathsome den defiled
With dripping human members, torn for meat? ”

“ But there is worse than treacherous-soul'd Miasma,
Lurking for prey, close-mask'd in orient glory,
Enveloping a man with subtle folds
Of dull impalpable mortality.
Sin is a deadlier malady than all!
These flowers are only strewn upon a corpse.
Man has made Earth a hissing and a scorn
Among the constellated worlds of light! ”

“ Mine own hands ruled the helm, my sleepless eyes
Watching the needle: often would we clutch
Fast, lest some phantom billow whirl us forth;
Hurrying, swirling, billows playing with us,
Whose foam-fangs gleam'd in night's chaotic war! ”

“ Low, murmurous sound pervades all emerald aisles,
As though the floral earth and leaves were breathing.
Life teems! a myriad hidden mandibles,
Amid lush herbage, under moss and loam,
Clear away life superfluous, and death. ”

“ Love is a fire!
Night will pass!
⁠I came to pleasant places on my way!
Lawns of deep verdure by a silvern water;
Wind-waved savannahs flush'd with floral bloom,
Clouded with saffron or cerulean flowers,
And little silken blossoms of pure snow,
Dying in dews of every dying eve,
Living in all revivals of the morn. ”

“ When first Aurora, his celestial mother,
Smiled sweet upon him from the Orient.
⁠Fresh from fierce thunder of the cataracts,
Tortured among dark demon-blocks of stone
Fireborn, divine Nile smoothes his ruffled flow ”

“ And all is silence—only a night air
Rustles a palm, dreaming among the stars,
From whose dim languorous long fronds they rise,
Slow disentangling their celestial gleam.
No human sound disturbs the solitude. ”

“ Pulling at wheels, that settle clogg'd with sand.
Shadows are sharply blotted on the ground:
Blue blazing daylight glares intolerable:
In a half-dreaming doze we journey on,
Still for our sole horizon the wan waste. ”

“ With mangroves, whose bare roots affect the fen.
One who rows softly, rounding promontories,
When these high hills are overarch'd with azure,
Dipping his paddle in a light blue water,
Beholds embower'd in sweet shingly coves
Palm-nestled, hive-like huts and villages,
Whose dwellers ply their busy crafts on shore,
While fishing gear and boats adorn the strand . . . ”

“ For a full account of the falls, see Livingstone's two books of travel. The water (of the river Zambesi, or Leeambayee) clears a moment as it falls, becomes a sheet of foam, or rather a sheet of comets of foam, separate from one another, with nucleus and tail. This phenomenon is apparently very remarkable; though I think I remember to have observed something like it in the falls of the Rhine. The "Evergreen Grove" is on a ledge of rock opposite the fall. But "Garden Island," where the travellers made a garden, is on the same side. ”

“ Another—more skilled in delicate distinctions, and priding himself on the adroitness with which, as it were, by a dexterous turn of the wrist, he can cause the fine edge of them to wound, without vulgarly and directly thrusting—might prefer to say, apropos of each writer in turn who chooses such themes, that "at any rate this writer has not shown how contemporary subjects may be made poetical"—which remark, however, the poet, if he be a poet, can afford to treat simply as a piece of impertinence. ”

“ One who hath sworn "by Him that sleeps in Philæ."
⁠Most ancient realm of all this ancient earth,2
Thought faints to sound thine hoar antiquity!
Europe and Asia were not when thy form
Brooded in solemn grandeur, as to-day,
Over dark ocean! when Dicynodon,
Ancestor of thy huge Leviathan,
Ruled over mightier seas and estuaries;
When melancholy vapours veil'd strange stars,
Ere man's wan yearning unavailing eyes
Awoke to wonder! ere the cataclysm
Rent all thy rocks, and summon'd forth the rivers . ”

“ Some indeed have failed in poetically representing what passed under their eyes, because the eyes of the soul were wanting—the Poet's Second sight. Moreover, the genius of some true poets has proved more at home in those rarer, yet still to them living, regions of the Past. ”

“ This is a man of the old heroic type: a grand personality, like those of Xavier, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Bellot, Boss, Parry, Franklin, Stephenson, Watt, Mungo Park; who exhibits, in a peculiarly fascinating phase of modern life, the heroic energy, and skilful perseverance in combating gigantic difficulties; partly from ideal and humane ends—to serve God and Man—partly for the mere sake of combating those difficulties themselves. ”

“ Now, peradventure, he hath learn'd the whole!
⁠But if Columbus, voyaging forlorn,
Wandering ever in wan ways unknown
Of shoreless ocean toward the dying day,
Daring, presumptuous mortal! to assail
Barriers Heaven piles against mankind ”