Let dauntless enterprise, with generous zeal,
Toil, not unlaurell'd, for her fellows' weal,
But be the howling wilderness untrod,
And trackless still, Sahara's barren flood.
Lo, from the streaming east, a blaze of light
Has swept to distant shores astonish'd night,
Darkness has snatch'd his spangled robe away,
And in full glory shines the new-born day ;*
Rejoice, ye flowery vales-ye verdant isles,
With the glad sunbeams weave your rosy smiles,
The bridegroom of the earth looks down in love,
And blooms in freshened beauty from above;
Ye waiting dews, leap to that warm embrace,
With fragrant incense bathe his blushing face;
Thou earth be robed in joy!-But one sad plain
Exults not, smiles not, to the morn again:
Soon as the sun is all in glory drest
The conscious desert heavest its troubled breast
Like one, aroused to ceaseless misery,
That, ever dying, strives once more—to die.
And can Sahara weep? With sudden blaze
Deep in her bosom pierce the cruel rays,
But never thence one tributary stream
Shall soar aloft to quench the maddening bea
Tearless in agony, fixt in grief, alone,
Pines the sad daughter of the torrid zone,
A rocky monument of anguish deep,
The Niobe of Nature cannot weep!
Yet from her bosom steams the sandy cloud,
And heavily waves above;-a lurid shroud,
Dense as the wing of sorrow, flapping o'er
The wither'd heart, that may not blossom more.
Faint o'er that burning desert, faint and slow,
Failing of limb, and pale with looks of wo,
Parch'd by the hot Siróc, and fiery ray,
The wearied kafflèt winds its toilsome way,
* A morning near the equator has no twilight.
"The solar beams causing the dust of the desert (as they emphatically call it) to rise and float through the air."-POTTINGER'S Travels to Beloochistan, p. 133.
'Tis long, long since the panther bounded by,
And howl'd and gazed upon them wistfully ;*
Long since the monarch lion from his lair
Arose, and thunder'd to the stagnant air:
No wandering ostrich with extended wing
Flaps o'er the sands, to seek the distant spring;
Bounding from rock† to rock, with curious scan
No wild gazelle surveys the stranger, man;
Nor does the famish'd tiger's lengthening roar
Speak to the winds and wake the echoes more.
But o'er these realms of sorrow, drear and vast,
In hollow dirges moans the desert blast,
Or breathing o'er the plain in smothered wrath,
Howls to the skulls that whiten on the path.
And as with heavy tramp they toil along,
Is heard no more the cheering Arab song-
No more the wild Bedouin's joyous shriek
With startling homage greets his wandering sheik,
Only the muttered curse, or whisper'd pray'r,
Or deep death-rattle wakes the sluggish air.
Behold one here, who till to-day has been
A father, and with bursting bosom seen
His last, his cherished one, whose waning eye
Smiled only resignation, droop and die!
Parch'd by the heat, those lips are curl'd and pale,
As rose-leaves withered in the northern gale;
Her eye no more its silent love shall speak,
No flush of life shall mantle on her cheek:
Yet with a phrensied fondness to his child
The father clung, and thought his darling smiled;
Ah, yes! 'tis death that o'er her beauty throws
That marble smile of deep and dread repose.
These animals are mentioned as inhabiting the skirts of the desert, but not found in the interior, by MUNGO PARK, vol. i. p. 142.
+ BUFFON, Hist. Nat., vol. vii. p. 248.- -"Une terre morte, &c., laquelle ne presente que des rochers debout on renversés."
Skeletons in the Desert, DENHAM and CLAPPERTON, vol. i. pages 130, 131; also, BUFFON, in the passage above quoted: "Une terre morte, et pour ainsi dire écorchéo par les vents, laquelle ne presente que, &c.-des ossements."
What thrilling shouts are these that rend the sky,
Whence is the joy that lights the sunken eye?
On, on, they speed their burning thirst to slake
In the blue waters of yon rippled lake-
Or must they still those maddening pangs assuage
In the sand-billows of the false mirage?
Lo the fair phantom, melting to the wind,
Leaves but the sting of baffled bliss behind.
Hope smiles again as with instinctive haste,†
The panting camels rush along the waste,
And snuff the grateful breeze, that sweeping by
Wafts its cool fragrance through the cloudless sky,
Swift as the steed that feels the slacken'd rein,
And flies impetuous o'er the sounding plain,
Eager as bursting from an Alpine source
The winter torrent in its headlong course,
Still hasting on, the wearied band behold
-The green oase, an emerald couch'd in gold!
And now the curving rivulet they descry,
That bow of hope upon a stormy sky,‡
Now ranging its luxuriant banks of green
In silent rapture gaze upon the scene:
His graceful arms the palm was waving there
Caught in the tall acacia's tangled hair,
While in festoons across his branches slung
The gay kossóm its scarlet tassels hung;
The flowering colocynth had studded round.
Jewels of promise o'er the joyful ground,
And where the smile of day burst on the stream,
The trembling waters glitter'd in the beam.
It comes, the blast of death! that sudden glare
Tinges with purple hues the stagnant air:
*For a description of the mirage, see Captain LYON's Travels, p. 347, and BURCK HARDT'S Nubia, p. 193.-" Its colour is of the purest azure."
+ The rush of a caravan to a stream in the desert is well described in BUCKINGHAM'S Mesopotamia, vol. ii. p. 8.
"The Simoom.-I saw from the south-east a haze come, in colour like the purple part of a rainbow, &c., a kind of blush upon the air, a meteor, or purple haze."BRUCE's Travels, vol. iv. p. 559.
Fearful in silence, o'er the heaving strand
Sweeps* the wild gale, and licks the curling sand,
While o'er the vast Sahara from afar
Rushes the tempest in his winged car:
Swift from their bed the flame-like billows rise,
Whirling and surging to the copper skies,
As when Briareus lifts his hundred arms,
Grasps at high heaven, and fills it with alarms;
In eddying chaos madly mixt on high
Gigantic pillars dance‡ along the sky,
Or stalk in awful slowness through the gloom,
Or track the coursers of the dread simoom,
Or clashing in mid air, to ruin hurl'd,
Fall as the fragments of a shatter'd world!
Hush'd is the tempest-desolate the plain,
Still'd are the billows of that troubled main ;
As if the voice of death had check'd the storm,
Each sandy wave retains its sculptured form:
And all is silence-save the distant blast
That howl'd, and mock'd the desert as it pass'd;
And all is solitude-for where are they
That o'er Sahara wound their toilsome way?
Ask of the heav'ns above, that smile serene,
Ask that burnt spot, no more of lovely green,
Ask of the whirlwind in its purple cloud,
The desert is their grave, the sand their shroud.*
* Στρόμβοι δὲ κὂνιν εἰλίσσουοι.—scH. Prom. v. 1091.
+ BRUCE, as above." We were at once surprised and terrified by a sight surely one of the most magnificent in the world. In that vast expanse of desert from W. to N. W. of us we saw a number of prodigious pillars of sand, at times moving with great celerity, at others stalking on with a majestic slowness; at intervals we thought they were coming to overwhelm us, &c. Sometimes they were broken near the middle, as if struck by a huge cannon-shot." See also GOLDSMITH'S An. Nat. vol. i. p. 363. ↑ DENHAM and CLAPP., i. 16.—" The overpowering effect of a sudden sand-wind, when near the close of the desert, often destroys a whole kafila (caravan), already weakened by fatigue," &c.—And p. 63—“The winds scorch as they pass; and bring with them billows of sand, rolling along in masses frightfully suffocating, which sometimes swallow up whole caravans and armies."
SYNOPSIS.-The natural beauty of Hindostan contrasted with its moral depravity.-Approach of a funeral procession.—Hymn of the Brahmins.—The widow.—Her early history. The scene of the funeral pile.-Enthusiastic feelings of the victim.-The pile is fired.-Address to British benevolence in behalf of the benighted Hindoos.
O, GOLDEN shores, primeval home of man,
How glorious is thy dwelling, Hindostan!
Thine are these smiling valleys, bright with bloom,
Wild woods and sandal-groves, that breathe perfume,
Thine, these fair skies-where morn's returning ray,
Has swept the starry robe of night away,*
And gilt each dome, and minaret, and tow'r,
Gemm'd every stream, and tinted every flow'r.
But dark the spirit within thee;—from old time
Still o'er thee rolls the whelming flood of crime,
Still o'er thee broods the curse of guiltless blood,
That shouts for vengeance from thy reeking sod:
Deep-flowing Ganges in his rushy bed
Moans a sad requiem for his children dead,
And, wafted frequent on the passing gale,
Rises the orphan's sigh-the widow's wail.
Hark, 'tis the rolling of the funeral drum,
The white-robed Brahmins see, they come, they come,
Bringing, with frantic shouts, and torch, and trump,
And mingled signs of melancholy pomp,
That livid corpse, brone solemnly on high-
And yon faint trembling victim, doom'd to die.
Still, as with measured step they move along:
With fiercer joy they weave the mystic song:
Eswara,† crown'd with forests, thee they praise,
Birmha, to thee the full-toned chorus raise;
To ocean-where the loose sail mariners furl,
And seek in coral caves the virgin pearl,
• EscH. Prom. v. 24. Пoikiλeiμwv výž, and ORPH. Argon. 1026, àorpoxirwv víz. + Eswara, goddess of Nature. Surya, the sun. Varuna, a water-nymph. Peris or spirits of a certain grade, are excluded from Paradise, from a gate of which Ganges flows. Kali, goddess of murder. Aglys, god of fire. Paváneh, of wind. See MAURICE'S Indian Antiq.
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