'Prologue'
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(Curtain rises; mists and darkness’ soft music throughout.)
One savage footprint on the lonely shore
Where one man listen’d to the surge’s roar,
Not all the winds that stir the mighty sea
Can ever ruffle in the memory.
If such its interest and thrall, O then
Pause on the footprints of heroic men,
Making a garden of the desert wide
Where Parry conquer’d death and Franklin died.
To that white region where the Lost lie low,
Wrapt in their mantles of eternal snow, -
Unvisited by change, nothing to mock
Those statues sculptured in the icy rock,
We pray your company; that hearts as true
(Though nothings of the air) may live for you;
Nor only yet that on our little glass
A faint reflection of those wilds may pass,
But that the secrets of the vast Profound
Within us, an exploring hand may sound,
Testing the region of the ice-bound soul,
Seeking the passage at its northern pole,
Softening the horrors of its wintry sleep,
Melting the surface of that ‘Frozen Deep.’
Vanish, ye mists! But ere this gloom departs,
And to the union of three sister arts
We give a winter evening, good to know
That in the charms of such another show,
That in the fiction of a friendly play,
The Arctic sailors, too, put gloom away,
Forgot their long night, saw no starry dome,
Hail’d the warm sun, and were again at Home.
Vanish, ye mists! Not yet do we repair
To the still country of the piercing air;
But seek, before the cross the troubled seas,
An English hearth and Devon’s waving trees.
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