THE DEAD HORSEMAN.
Occasioned by reading the manner of carrying a young man to burial, on the back of a horse, in the mountainous region about Vettie's Giel in Norway, in a road on the precipitous declivity of a mountain, so narrow that two persons cannot pass abreast.
Who's riding o'er the Giel so fast,
Mid the crags of Utledale?
He heeds nor cold, nor storm, nor blast,
Though his cheek is deadly pale.
A fringe of pearl from his eye-lash long
The wintry frost hath hung,
And his sinewy arm seems bold and strong,
Yet his brow is smooth and young.
O'er his marble forehead in clusters bright
Is wreath'd his golden hair,
His robe is of linen long and white.
Though a mantle of fur scarce could bide the blight
Of this keen and frosty air.
God speed thee now, thou horseman bold!
For the tempest awakes in wrath,
And thy stony eye is fix'd and cold
As the glass of thine icy path.
Down, down the precipice wild he breaks,
Where the foaming waters roar,
And his way up the cliff of the mountain takes,
Where man never trod before.
No checking hand to the rein he lends
On frost-clad summits sheen,
But ever and aye his head he bends
As they plunge in some dark ravine.
Dost thou bow in thy prayer to the God who guides
Thy course o'er such pavement frail?
Or nod in thy dream o'er the steep where glides
The slippery brook with its curdling tides,
Thou horseman, so young and pale?
Swift over the face of the frozen streams
Toward Lyster Church he hies,
Whose holy spire mid the mountains, gleams
Like a star in troubled skies.
Now stay! thou ghastly traveller, stay!
Here pause in thy mad career,—
Be the guilt of thy bosom as dark as it may,
Thou surely canst purge it here.
But on, like the winged blast, he wends,
Where the bones of the dead are laid,—
Where the sigh of a mourning group ascends
From the depth of that cypress shade.
At a pit he stay'd, whose narrow brink
Mid swollen snow was grooved,—
The trembling steed from that chasm did shrink,
But the rider sat unmoved.
They bare him sad from his lonely seat,
His father bound his head,—
And they laid him low in that dark retreat,
And breath'd, in accents simply sweet,
The dirge for the youthful dead.
With pride, in a life of toil severe,
His hardy breast had glow'd,
And it scorn'd, in the ease of the slothful bier,
To pass to its last abode.
But his own loved steed, which his hands had drest
In the mirth of his boyhood's day,
By the load of his lifeless limbs was prest,
As he sped to his home of clay.
Yet oft to the depths of yon rock-barr'd dell,
Where no ray from heaven hath glow'd,
Where the thundering rush of the Markefoss fell,
The trembling child shall point and tell
How that fearful horseman rode.