Vague mystery hangs on all these desert places!
The fear which hath no name hath wrought a spell!
Strength, courage, wrath, have been, and left no traces!
They came,—and fled; but whither? who can tell?
We know but that they were,—that once (in days
When ocean was a bar ’twixt man and man),
Stout spirits wandered o’er these capes and bays,
And perished, where these river-waters ran.
Methinks they should have built some mighty tomb,
Whose granite might endure the century’s rain,
White winter, and the sharp night-winds that boom
Like spirits in their purgatorial pain.
They left, ’t is said, their proud unburied bones
To whiten on this unacknowledged shore;
Yet naught besides the rocks and worn sea-stones
Now answers to the great Pacific’s roar!
A mountain stands where Agamemnon died:
And Cheops hath derived eternal fame,
Because he made his tomb a place of pride;
And thus the dead Metella earned a name.
But these,—they vanished as the lightnings die
(Their mischiefs over) in the surging deep;
And no one knoweth underneath the sky,
What heroes perished here, nor where they sleep.