The Friend is
some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific
seas. Many are the dangers to be encountered, equinoctial gales
and coral reefs, ere he may sail before the constant trades. But
who would not sail through mutiny and storm, even over Atlantic
waves, to reach the fabulous retreating shores of some continent
man? The imagination still clings to the faintest tradition of
THE ATLANTIDES.
The smothered streams of love, which flow
More bright than Phlegethon, more low,
Island us ever, like the sea,
In an Atlantic mystery.
Our fabled shores none ever reach,
No mariner has found our beach,
Scarcely our mirage now is seen,
And neighboring waves with floating green,
Yet still the oldest charts contain
Some dotted outline of our main;
In ancient times midsummer days
Unto the western islands' gaze,
To Teneriffe and the Azores,
Have shown our faint and cloud-like shores.
But sink not yet, ye desolate isles,
Anon your coast with commerce smiles,
And richer freights ye'll furnish far
Than Africa or Malabar.
Be fair, be fertile evermore,
Ye rumored but untrodden shore,
Princes and monarchs will contend
Who first unto your land shall send,
And pawn the jewels of the crown
To call your distant soil their own.
Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner's
compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We
are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful
discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his
time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and as
it were in a straight line.
Sea and land are but his neighbors,
And companions in his labors,
Who on the ocean's verge and firm land's end
Doth long and truly seek his Friend.
Many men dwell far inland,
But he alone sits on the strand.
Whether he ponders men or books,
Always still he seaward looks,
Marine news he ever reads,
And the slightest glances heeds,
Feels the sea breeze on his cheek,
At each word the landsmen speak,
In every companion's eye
A sailing vessel doth descry;
In the ocean's sullen roar
From some distant port he hears,
Of wrecks upon a distant shore,
And the ventures of past years.
Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of Tadmore of
the desert? There is on the earth no institution which
Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no
scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple, nor even a
solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited,
but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the
shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the
monuments of inhabitants.
However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not
diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we
are cast more and more into the centre.
