Rampolli

Then the water above grows smooth as glass,
While, below, dull roarings ply;
And, trembling, they hear the murmur pass—
“High-hearted youth, farewell! good-bye!”
And, hollower still, comes the howl affraying,
Till their hearts are sick with the frightful delaying.

If the crown itself thou in should fling,
And say, “Who back with it hies
Himself shall wear it, and shall be king,”
I should not covet the precious prize!
What Ocean hides in that howling hell of it,
Live soul will never come back to tell of it!

Ships many, caught in that whirling surge,
Shot sheer to their dismal doom:
Keel and mast only did ever emerge,
Shattered, from out the all-gulping tomb!—
Like the bluster of tempest, clearer and clearer,
Comes its roaring nearer and ever nearer!

It wallows, seethes, hisses, in raging rout,
As when water wrestles with fire,
Till to heaven the yeasty tongues they spout,
Wave upon wave’s back mounting higher;
And as with the rumble of distant thunder
Bellowing it bursts from the dark lap under.

And see, from its bosom, flowing dark,
Something heave up, swan-white!
An arm and a shining neck they mark,
And it rows with unrelaxing might!
It is he! and aloft in his left hand holden,
He swings, recovered, the beaker golden!

With long deep breaths his path he ploughed,
Glad greeting the heavenly day;
Jubilant shouted the gazing crowd,
“He lives! he is free! he has burst his way!
Out of the grave, the whirlpool uproarious,
The hero hath rescued his life victorious!”

He comes; they surround him with shouts of glee;
At the king’s feet he sinks on the sod,
And hands him the beaker upon his knee.
To his lovely daughter the king gives a nod:
She fills it brim-full of wine sparkling and raying;
And then to the monarch the youth turned, saying:

“Long live the king!—Ah, well doth he fare
Who breathes in this rosy light!
For frightful, yea, horrible is it down there;
And man ought not to tempt the heavenly Might,
Or long to see, with prying unwholesome,
What He graciously covers with darkness dolesome!

“It tore me down as on lightning’s wing—
When a shaft in a rock outpours,
Wild-rushing against me, a torrent spring:
Its conflict seized me with raging force
And like a top, with giddy twisting,
Spun me about: there was no resisting!

“Then God did show me, sore beseeching
In deepest, frightfullest need,
Up from the bottom a rock-ledge reaching—
At it I caught, and from death was freed!
And behold, on spiked corals the beaker suspended
Which had else to the very abyss descended!

“For below me it lay yet mountain-deep
The purply darksome maw!
And, though to the ear it was dead asleep,
The ghasted eye, down staring, saw
How, with dragons, lizards, salamanders, crawling,
The hell-jaws horrible were sprawling!

“Black-swarming, in medley miscreate,
In masses lumped hideously,
Wallowed the conger, the thorny skate,
The lobster’s grisly deformity;
And, baring its teeth with cruel sheen, a
Terrible shark, the sea’s hyena.

“So there I hung, and shuddering knew
That human help was none;
One thinking soul mid the horrid crew,
In the ghastly desert I was alone—
Deeper than human speech e’er sounded,
By the sad waste’s dismal monsters surrounded!

“Thus thought I, and shivered. Then a something crept near
Upon legs with a hundred joints!
It snaps at me suddenly: frantic with fear
I lost my grasp of the coral points:
Away the whirl in its raging tore me—
But it was my salvation, and upward bore me!”

The king at the tale is filled with amaze:—