Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

And she had her best look of might and beauty on,
As she swept across the seas that day.

The wind was fair and soft, both alow and aloft,
And we wore the even hours away.

The steadying sun heaved up, as day drew on,

And there grew a long swell of the sea.

And, first in upper air, then under, everywhere,
From the topmost towering sail

Down, down to quarter-rail,

The wind began to breathe more free.

It was soon to breathe its last,

For a wild and bitter blast

Was the master of that stormy day to be.

was the topman's hail:

"Ho! Hilloa! A sail ! "
"A sail, hull-down upon our lee!"
Then with sea-glass to his eye,

And his gray locks blowing by,

The Admiral sought what she might be.

And from top, and from deck,

Was it ship? Was it wreck ? A far-off, far-off speck,

Of a sudden we found upon our lee.

On the round waters wide, floated no thing beside,

But we and the stranger sail:

And a hazy sky, that threatened storm,

Came coating the heaven so blue and warm,

And ahead hung the portent of a gale;

A black bank hanging there

When the order came, to wear,

Was remembered, ever after, in the tale.

Across the long, slow swell

That scarcely rose and fell,

The wind began to blow out of the cloud;

And scarce an hour was gone ere the gale was fairly on,

And through our strained rigging howled aloud.

Before the stormy wind, that was maddening behind,

We gathered in our canvas farthest spread.

Black clouds had started out

From the heavens all about,

And the welkin grew all black overhead.

But though stronger and more strong

The fierce gale rushed along,

The stranger brought her old wind in her breast.

Up came the ship from the far-off sea,

And on with the strong wind's breath rushed we.
She grew to the eye, against the clouded sky,
And eagerly her points and gear we guessed.
As we made her out, at last,

She was maimed in spar and mast

And she hugged the easy breeze for rest.

We could see the old wind fail

At the nearing of our gale;

We could see them lay their course with the wind:

Still we neared and neared her fust,

Hurled on by our fierce blast,

With the seas tumbling headlong behind.

She had come out of some storm, and, in many a busy swarm,

Her crew were refitting, as they might,

The wreck of upper spars

That had left their ugly scars,

As if the ship had come out of a fight.

We scanned her well, as we drifted by:

A strange old ship, with her poop built high,

And with quarter-galleries wide,

And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now,

And carvings all strange, beside.

A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark

Long years and generations ago;

Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard

With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow.

She was the brave old Orient,

The old imperial Orient,

Brought down from times afar,

Not such as our ships are,

But unchanged in hull and unchanged in spar,

Since mighty ships of war were builded so.

Down her old black side poured the water in a tide,

As they toiled to get the better of a leak:

We had got a signal set in the shrouds,

And our men through the storm looked on in crowds:

But for wind, we were near enough to speak.

It seemed her sea and sky were in times long, long gone by,

That we read in winter-evens about;

As if to other stars

She had reared her old-world spars,

And her hull had kept an old-time ocean out.

We saw no signal fly, and her men scarce lifted eye,

But toiled at the work that was to do;

It warmed our English blood

When across the stormy flood

We saw the old ship and her crew.

The glories and the memories of other days agone

Seemed clinging to the old ship, as in storm she labored on. The old ship Orient!

The brave, imperial Orient!

All that stormy night through, our ship was lying-to

Whenever we could keep her to the wind;

1857-60.

But late in the next day we gained a quiet bay,
For the tempest had left us far behind.

So before the sunny town

Went our anchors splashing down:

Our sails we hung all out to the sun;

While airs from off the steep

Came playing at bo-peep

With our canvas, hour by hour, in their fun.
We leaned on boom or rail with many a lazy tale

Of the work of the storm that had died;
And watched, with idle eyes,

Our floats, like summer flies,

Riding lazily about the ship's side.

Suddenly they cried, from the other deck,
That the Orient was gone to wreck!

That her hull lay high on a broken shore,

And the brave old ship would float no more.

But we heard a sadder tale, ere the night came on,

And a truer tale, of the ship that was gone.

They had seen from the height,

As she came from yester-night,

While the storm had not gone by, and the sea was running high,

A ship driving heavily to land;

A strange great ship (so she seemed to be

While she tumbled and rolled on the far-off sea,

And strange when she toiled, near at hand),

But some ship of mark and fame,

Though crippled, then, and lame,

And that must have been gallantly manned.

So she came, driving fast;

They could tell her men, at last;

There were harbors down the coast on her lee;

When, strangely, she broached to,

Then, with her gallant crew,

Went headlong down into the sea.

That was the Orient;

The brave old Orient:

Such a ship as never more will be.

Parke Godwin.

BORN in Paterson, N. J., 1816.

THE DRAMATIC ART.

[From an Address at the Reception of Henry Irving by the New York Goethe Society, 15 March, 1888.]

THE

HE Creator has conferred upon his creatures no more benignant gift than the play-impulse, as Schiller calls it-the love of fun, which is the origin of all sports and pastimes, and a relief essential to our burdens of actual care. By contributing to this impulse, the dramatic art has diffused in all civilized nations an amount of innocent and wholesome pleasure it would be impossible to calculate. At the same time in doing this, it has called into exercise also other and higher functions whereby it takes a firmer hold of human sympathies than any other art, and becomes a more powerful instrument of good and evil to the community. This superiority it owes, partly, to its form, which brings it into immediate contact with the public, and enables it to address and capture not only its intellect and its senses, but the feelings which are our real motive powers. By the use of the human voice, and by living personal action, it catches directly the inspiration of popular life and gives its own inspiration back, heart-throb for heart-throb, we may say. Its singular felicity in this respect is that it appropriates and combines the virtues and charms of all other arts and superadds virtues and charms peculiar to itself. It does all that they can do, and it does more. Thus, while it abounds in "wise saws and modern instances" like ordinary prose; while it tells an absorbing story like the epic; while it pours forth the spontaneous emotions of the individual soul, like the lyric; while it presents to the eye noble and graceful figures like sculpture; while it surrounds these figures with brilliant and harmonious colors like painting; while it constrains the delicious assistance of music, it joins to these a power of characterizing persons, and of placing these persons in situations to excite terror, pity, affection, curiosity, merriment and sorrow, that immensely heightens and broadens and intensifies its capacities. In this portrayal of character in action, moreover, it is qualified to use, more variously and vividly than any other art, the most luscious, genial, and salutary of the powers of genius-the faculty of humor, ever twin-born with pathos, which steeps the muddled brain in baths of sunshine, and lubricates the grating hinges of action with an oil of gladness. For this reason the theatre has been and is preeminently a home and temple of humor and pathos

laughing pretension, self-righteousness, and folly off the face of the earth, and uniting the hearts of men in those soft and tender emotions which "make the whole world kin."

Again, secondly, the drama owes its superiority of influence to its substance, or, the special attractiveness of its themes. Man is, of all things that man knows, the most interesting to man, and the drama concerns itself with man in the whole round of his being, in all the varieties of his social condition and in all the subtleties of his individual motive. From kings and princes to clowns and clod-hoppers-from stately and lovely women who surpass the ideals of our dreams to homely nurses and butter-fingered dairy-maids-from the heroic defenders of nations and sturdy burghers to those whimsical and eccentric fellows who seem a mere joke of nature,-not an atom of humanity escapes its scrutiny and, we might say, its love. Nor is there a shade of anything that concerns them to which it is indifferent: their relations to outstanding nature, to the state, to the family, and to one another, as they act upon their surroundings and are acted upon by them,-are recognized, and all their collisions, struggles, loves and hates, their ambitions, and their humiliations, their whims and caprices even, furnish the materials of its magic.

Each one of the vast and motley human throng is painted, to himself and to others, as he is, that others and himself, as impartial spectators, may see the dignity and worth, or the worthlessness, of what he does, or the certain issues of his character and conduct. In the well-worn phrase, "the drama holds a mirror up to nature," that nature may see herself in her deformity as in her beauty, get ashamed thereby of her meanness and littleness, chastise her ugly excesses, and, as Goethe sings

Im ganzen, guten, schoenen
Resolut zu leben-

or to strive heartily to conduct her affairs in the lines of truth, goodness, and beauty.

By this anniversary of sympathy and of methods, dramatic art builds up a world of its own within the world of experience: all the grand literatures, indeed, do that, so that we possess a Homeric world, a Dantean world, a Cervantean world, and others,-but it is given to no literature to create so vast, multiform, and populous a world, and one which is so open to all mankind, as to the drama. You will say that it is only an ideal world-and that is so-sometimes of "buoyant and aerial texture," floating between heaven and earth, tinged with the hues of the rainbow, and peopled by gay creatures of the element,-sometimes of chivalric emprise or romantic adventure, where the skies are soft sunshine only and the fields grow nothing but flowers,--whose inhab

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »