With crested Azräel shall a mortal strive,
Or breathe the gales of pestilence, and live?
O then, let avarice his hand refrain,
Nor tempt the billows of that fiery main;
Let patience, toil, and courage, nobly dare
Far other deeds than fruitless labors there;
Let dauntless enterprise, with generous zeal,
Toil, not unlaurelled, 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 astonished night;
Darkness has snatch'd his spangled robe away,
And in full glory shines the new-born day; t
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 heaves 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 beam
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!
Azrael, the angel of death.
↑ A morning near the equator has no twilight.
"The solar beains causing the dust of the desert (as they emphatically cal! it) to rise
and float through the air." - Pottinger's Travels to Beloochistan, p. 133.
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 withered heart, that may not blossom more.
Faint o'er that burning desert, faint and slow,
Failing of limb, and pale with looks of woe,
Parched by the hot Siróc, and fiery ray,
The wearied kaffle winds its toilsome way,
'Tis long, long since the panther bounded by,
And howled, and gazed upon them wistfully; †
Long since the monarch lion from his lair
Arose, and thundered to the stagnant air:
No wandering os rich, 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 famished 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 whispered prayer,
Or deep death-rattle, wakes the sluggish air.
†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 ou renversés."
§ Skeletons in the desert, Denham and Clapperton, vol. i., pp. 130, 131; also Buffon, in the passage above quoted. "Une terre morte, et pour ainsi dire ècorchée, par les vents laquelle ne presente que, &c.- des ossements.
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!
Parched by the heat, those lips are curled and palo,
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 frenzied 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.
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, f
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 slackened 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 couched in gold!
And now the curving rivulet they descry,
That bow of hope upon a stormy sky,
For a description of the mirage, see Capt. Lyon's Travels, p. 347, and Burckhardt's Nubia, p. 193.--"Its color is of the purest azure."
↑ The rush of a caravan to a stream in the desert is well described in Buckingham's Mesopotamia, vol i, p. 8
↑ Bruce's Travels, vol iv., p. 559. —"The simoom-I saw from the S. E. a haze
Now ranging its luxuriant banks of green,
In silent rapture gaze upon the scene:
His graceful arms the palm was waving thero,
Caught in the tall acacia's tangled hair,
While in festoons across his branches slung
The gay kossóm in 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 glittered in the beam.
It comes, the blast of death! that sudden glare
Tinges with purple hues the stagnant air:
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 hurled,
Fall as the fragments of a shattered world!
Hushed is the tempest, desolate the plain,
Stilled are the billows of that troubled main;
come, in color like the purple part of a rainbow, &c., a kind of blush upon the air, a meteor, or purple haze."
* Στρόμβοι δὲ κόνιν εἰλίσσουσι. - Æsch. Prom. v. 1091.
↑ Bruce (as above). "We were here 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 in a few minutes to overwhelm us, &c. Sometimes they were broken near the middle, as if struck with a huge cannon-shot." See also Golasmith's An. Nat. vol. i.. p. 363.
As if the voice of death had checked the storm,
Each sandy wave retains its sculptured form:
And all is silence, -
That howled, and mocked the desert as it passed;
And all is solitude, for where are they,
That o'er Sahara wound their toilsome way?
Ask of the heavens 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.*
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 tower,
Gemmed every stream and tinted every flower.
But dark the spirit within thee; from old time
Still o'er thee rolls the wheeling flood of crime,
* 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."
† Æsch. Prom. v. 24. workiλelpwv výž, and Orph. Argon 1026, doτpoxíτwv vúž.
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