East and West: Poems Part 5

"Who comes?" The sentry's warning cry Rings sharply on the evening air: Who comes? The challenge: no reply, Yet something motions there.

A woman, by those graceful folds; A soldier, by that martial tread: "Advance three paces. Halt! until Thy name and rank be said."

"My name? Her name, in ancient song, Who fearless from Olympus came: Look on me! Mortals know me best In battle and in flame."

"Enough! I know that clarion voice; I know that gleaming eye and helm; Those crimson lips,--and in their dew The best blood of the realm.

"The young, the brave, the good and wise, Have fallen in thy curst embrace: The juices of the grapes of wrath Still stain thy guilty face.

"My brother lies in yonder field, Face downward to the quiet gra.s.s: Go back! he cannot see thee now; But here thou shalt not pa.s.s."

A crack upon the evening air, A wakened echo from the hill: The watch-dog on the distant sh.o.r.e Gives mouth, and all is still.

The sentry with his brother lies Face downward on the quiet gra.s.s; And by him, in the pale moonshine, A shadow seems to pa.s.s.

No lance or warlike shield it bears: A helmet in its pitying hands Brings water from the nearest brook, To meet his last demands.

Can this be she of haughty mien, The G.o.ddess of the sword and shield?

Ah, yes! The Grecian poet's myth Sways still each battle-field.

For not alone that rugged war Some grace or charm from beauty gains; But, when the G.o.ddess' work is done, The woman's still remains.

Address.

Opening of the California Theatre, San Francisco, Jan. 19, 1870

Brief words, when actions wait, are well The prompter's hand is on his bell; The coming heroes, lovers, kings, Are idly lounging at the wings; Behind the curtain's mystic fold The glowing future lies unrolled,-- And yet, one moment for the Past; One retrospect,--the first and last.

"The world's a stage," the master said.

To-night a mightier truth is read: Not in the shifting canvas screen, The flash of gas, or tinsel sheen; Not in the skill whose signal calls From empty boards baronial halls; But, fronting sea and curving bay, Behold the players and the play.

Ah, friends! beneath your real skies The actor's short-lived triumph dies: On that broad stage, of empire won Whose footlights were the setting sun, Whose flats a distant background rose In trackless peaks of endless snows; Here genius bows, and talent waits To copy that but One creates.

Your shifting scenes: the league of sand, An avenue by ocean spanned; The narrow beach of straggling tents, A mile of stately monuments; Your standard, lo! a flag unfurled, Whose clinging folds clasp half the world,-- This is your drama, built on facts, With "twenty years between the acts."

One moment more: if here we raise The oft-sung hymn of local praise, Before the curtain facts must sway; _Here_ waits the moral of your play.

Gla.s.sed in the poet's thought, you view What _money_ can, yet cannot do; The faith that soars, the deeds that shine, Above the gold that builds the shrine.

And oh! when others take our place, And Earth's green curtain hides our face, Ere on the stage, so silent now, The last new hero makes his bow: So may our deeds, recalled once more In Memory's sweet but brief encore, Down all the circling ages run, With the world's plaudit of "Well done!"

The Lost Galleon.

In sixteen hundred and forty-one, The regular yearly galleon, Laden with odorous gums and spice, India cottons and India rice, And the richest silks of far Cathay, Was due at Acapulco Bay.

Due she was, and over-due,-- Galleon, merchandise, and crew, Creeping along through rain and shine, Through the tropics, under the line.

The trains were waiting outside the walls, The wives of sailors thronged the town, The traders sat by their empty stalls, And the viceroy himself came down; The bells in the tower were all a-trip, _Te Deums_ were on each father's lip, The limes were ripening in the sun For the sick of the coming galleon.

All in vain. Weeks pa.s.sed away, And yet no galleon saw the bay: India goods advanced in price; The governor missed his favorite spice; The senoritas mourned for sandal, And the famous cottons of Coromandel;

And some for an absent lover lost, And one for a husband,--Donna Julia, Wife of the captain, tempest-tossed, In circ.u.mstances so peculiar: Even the fathers, unawares, Grumbled a little at their prayers; And all along the coast that year Votive candles were scarce and dear.

Never a tear bedims the eye That time and patience will not dry; Never a lip is curved with pain That can't be kissed into smiles again: And these same truths, as far as I know, Obtained on the coast of Mexico More than two hundred years ago,

In sixteen hundred and fifty-one,-- Ten years after the deed was done,-- And folks had forgotten the galleon: The divers plunged in the Gulf for pearls, White as the teeth of the Indian girls; The traders sat by their full bazaars; The mules with many a weary load, And oxen, dragging their creaking cars, Came and went on the mountain road.

Where was the galleon all this while: Wrecked on some lonely coral isle?

Burnt by the roving sea-marauders, Or sailing north under secret orders?

Had she found the Anian pa.s.sage famed, By lying Moldonado claimed, And sailed through the sixty-fifth degree Direct to the North Atlantic sea?

Or had she found the "River of Kings,"

Of which De Fonte told such strange things In sixteen forty? Never a sign, East or West or under the line, They saw of the missing galleon; Never a sail or plank or chip, They found of the long-lost treasure-ship, Or enough to build a tale upon.

But when she was lost, and where and how, Are the facts we're coming to just now.

Take, if you please, the chart of that day Published at Madrid,--_por el Rey_; Look for a spot in the old South Sea, The hundred and eightieth degree Longitude, west of Madrid: there, Under the equatorial glare, Just where the East and West are one, You'll find the missing galleon,-- You'll find the "San Gregorio," yet Riding the seas, with sails all set, Fresh as upon the very day She sailed from Acapulco Bay.

How did she get there? What strange spell Kept her two hundred years so well, Free from decay and mortal taint?

What? but the prayers of a patron saint!

A hundred leagues from Manilla town, The "San Gregorio's" helm came down; Round she went on her heel, and not A cable's length from a galliot That rocked on the waters, just abreast Of the galleon's course, which was west-sou-west.

Then said the galleon's commandante, General Pedro Sobriente (That was his rank on land and main, A regular custom of Old Spain), "My pilot is dead of scurvy: may I ask the longitude, time, and day?"

The first two given and compared; The third,--the commandante stared!

"The _first_ of June? I make it second."

Said the stranger, "Then you've wrongly-reckoned; I make it _first_: as you came this way, You should have lost--d'ye see--a day; Lost a day, as plainly see, On the hundred and eightieth degree."

"Lost a day?" "Yes: if not rude, When did you make east longitude?"

"On the ninth of May,--our patron's day."

"On the ninth?--_you had no ninth of May!_ Eighth and tenth was there; but stay"-- Too late; for the galleon bore away.

Lost was the day they should have kept, Lost unheeded and lost unwept; Lost in a way that made search vain, Lost in the trackless and boundless main; Lost like the day of Job's awful curse, In his third chapter, third and fourth verse; Wrecked was their patron's only day,-- What would the holy fathers say?

Said the Fray Antonio Estavan, The galleon's chaplain,--a learned man,-- "Nothing is lost that you can regain: And the way to look for a thing is plain To go where you lost it, back again.

Back with your galleon till you see The hundred and eightieth degree.

Wait till the rolling year goes round, And there will the missing day be found; For you'll find--if computation's true-- That sailing _east_ will give to you Not only one ninth of May, but two,-- One for the good saint's present cheer, And one for the day we lost last year."

Back to the spot sailed the galleon; Where, for a twelve-month, off and on The hundred and eightieth degree, She rose and fell on a tropic sea: But lo! when it came to the ninth of May, All of a sudden becalmed she lay One degree from that fatal spot, Without the power to move a knot; And of course the moment she lost her way, Gone was her chance to save that day.

To cut a lengthening story short, She never saved it. Made the sport Of evil spirits and baffling wind, She was always before or just behind, One day too soon, or one day too late, And the sun, meanwhile, would never wait: She had two eighths, as she idly lay, Two tenths, but never a _ninth_ of May; And there she rides through two hundred years Of dreary penance and anxious fears: Yet through the grace of the saint she served, Captain and crew are still preserved.