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Would remind them forevermore

Of their native forests they should not see again.

And everywhere

The slender, graceful spars

Poise aloft in the air,

And at the mast-head,

White, blue, and red,

A flag unrolls the stripes and stars.

Ah! when the wanderer, lonely, friendless,

In foreign harbors shall behold

That flag unrolled,

"Twill be as a friendly hand

Stretched out from his native land,

Filling his heart with memories sweet and endless!

All is finished! and at length

Has come the bridal day

Of beauty and strength.

Today the vessel shall be launched!

With fleecy clouds the sky is blanched,
And o'er the bay,

Slowly, in all his splendors dight,

The great sun rises to behold the sight.
The ocean old,

Centuries old,

Strong as youth, and as uncontrolled,
Paces restless to and fro,

Up and down the sands of gold.
His beating heart is not at rest;
And far and wide,

With ceaseless flow,

His beard of snow

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Her snow-white signals fluttering, blending,
Round her like a veil descending,

Ready to be

The bride of the gray old sea.

On the deck another bride

Is standing by her lover's side.

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Shadows from the flag and shrouds,
Like the shadows cast by clouds,
Broken by many a sudden fleck,
Fall around them on the deck.

The prayer is said,

The service read,

The joyous bridegroom bows his head;
And in tears the good old Master
Shakes the brown hand of his son,
Kisses his daughter's glowing cheek
In silence, for he cannot speak,
And ever faster

Down his own the tears begin to run.
The worthy pastor-

The shepherd of that wandering flock,
That has the ocean for its wold,
That has the vessel for its fold,
Leaping ever from rock to rock-
Spake, with accents mild and clear,
Words of warning, words of cheer,

But tedious to the bridegroom's ear.
He knew the chart

Of the sailor's heart,

All its pleasures and its griefs,
All its shallows and rocky reefs,

All those secret currents, that flow

With such resistless undertow,

And lift and drift, with terrible force,
The will from its moorings and its course.
Therefore he spake, and thus1 said he:—
"Like unto ships far off at sea,
Outward or homeward bound, are we.

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Before, behind, and all around,
Floats and swings the horizon's bound,
Seems at its distant rim to rise

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And climb the crystal wall of the skies,
And then again to turn and sink,

As if we could slide from its outer brink.

Ah! it is not the sea,

It is not the sea that sinks and shelves,
But ourselves

1. Pastors of sailors' churches, endeared
in the tradition of New England wooden
ships and whaling, are typified by the
famous Father Taylor of the Seamen's

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Bethel of Boston, whose sea-savored sermons are recalled in that below, as also in that of Melville's Father Mapple (Moby Dick, Chapter 9).

That rock and rise

With endless and uneasy motion,
Now touching the very skies,

Now sinking into the depths of ocean.
Ah! if our souls but poise and swing
Like the compass in its brazen ring,
Ever level and ever true

To the toil of the task we have to do,

We shall sail securely, and safely reach

The Fortunate Isles,2 on whose shining beach
The sights we see, and the sounds we hear,
Will be those of joy and not of fear!"

Then the Master,

With a gesture of command,

Waved his hand;

And at the word,

Loud and sudden there was heard,

All around them and below,

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Of tenderness and watchful care!
Sail forth into the sea, O ship!

Through wind and wave, right onward steer!
The moistened eye, the trembling lip,

Are not the signs of doubt or fear.

Sail forth into the sea of life,

2. Established by Vergil's "fortunate isle" as journey's end, or paradise; cf. Aeneid, Book VI, 1. 639.

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3. Carpenter's terms for the props and braces, that hold the vessel in the slip.

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O gentle, loving, trusting wife,

And safe from all adversity
Upon the bosom of that sea
Thy comings and thy goings be!
For gentleness and love and trust
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust;
And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives!

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

We know what Master laid thy keel,

What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
"Tis of the wave and not the rock;
"Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,

Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,

Are all with thee, are all with thee!

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport*

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,

At rest in all this moving up and down!

4. In his diary for July 9, 1852, at Newport, Rhode Island, the poet wrote: "Went this morning into the Jewish burying-ground *** There are few graves; nearly all are low tombstones of marble with Hebrew inscriptions, and a few words added in English or Portuguese. *** It is a shady nook, at the corner of two dusty, frequented streets,

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[1849] 1850

with an iron fence and a granite gateway***"The poem was written in the difficult stanza of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Longfellow's poem appeared in Putnam's Monthly Magazine for July, 1854, and was included in the "Birds of Passage" section of The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858).

The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the southwind's breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.5

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.
The very names recorded here are strange,

Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera' interchange

With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"

The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;" Then added, in the certainty of faith,

"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,

No Psalms of David now the silence break,

No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue

In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,

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Drove o'er the sea-that desert desolate-
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?8
They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass,9 in mirk and mire;

Taught in the school of patience to endure

The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,

And slaked its thirst with marah1 of their tears.

5. Exodus, second book of the Old
Testament, records the migration of the
Israelites from Egypt under Moses.
6. Cf. Exodus xxxii: 19.

7. The majority of the colonial Jewish
families of New England were traders
from Portugal or Spain.

8. Abraham's concubine, Hagar, and her son, Ishmael, were exiled when his

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aged wife, Sarah, bore Isaac (Genesis xvi and xxi).

9. Like "ghetto," Judenstrass (German, "street of Jews") refers to a restricted urban area designated for Jews.

1. Hebrew, "bitterness." Marah was a spring of bitter, undrinkable water found by the famishing Israelites in the wilderness. Cf. Exodus xv: 23-26.

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