Footprints of Former Men in Far CornwallHawker, Robert Stephen
History
Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall
Hawker, Robert Stephen
Cornwall (England : County) -- History
myself, for two anxious and grieving parents in Denmark, tidings of
their lost son. His name, he said, was Philip Bengstein, and it was in
the correspondence that this strange and touching history transpired.
The father, who immediately afterward wrote to my address, told me in
tearful words, that his son, bearing that name, had gone away from his
native home because his parents had resisted a marriage which he was
desirous to contract. They found that he had gone to sea before the
mast, a position much below his station in life; and they had traced
him from ship to ship, until at last they found him on the papers
of the _Alonzo_, of Stockton-on-Tees. Then their inquiry as to the
fate of that vessel had led them to the knowledge through the owners
that the vicar of a parish on the seaboard of North Cornwall could in
all likelihood convey to them some tidings of their long-lost son. I
related in reply the history of the death, discovery, and burial of
the unfortunate young man. I was enabled to verify and to understand
the initial letters of his own name, and of her who was not to become
his bride--although she still clung to his memory in loving loneliness
in that foreign land! Ample evidence, therefore, verified his corpse,
and I was proudly enabled to certify to his parents the reverent
burial of their child. A letter is treasured among my papers filled to
overflowing with the strong and earnest gratitude of a stranger and a
Dane for the kindness we had rendered to one who loved “not wisely,”
perchance, “but too well,” to that son who had been lost and was found
too late: one, too, “whose course of true love” had brought him from
distant Denmark to a green hillock among the dead, beneath a lonely
tower among the trees, by the Cornish sea! What a picture was that
which we saw painted upon the bosom and the limbs of a dead man, of
fond and faithful love, of severed and broken hearts, of disappointed
hope, of a vacant chair and a hushed voice in a far-away Danish
home! Linked with such themes as these which I have related in this
Remembrance are the subjoined verses, which were written on a rock by
the shore.
THE STORM
War! ’mid the ocean and the land!
The battle-field Morwenna’s strand,
Where rock and ridge the bulwark keep,
The giant warders of the deep!
They come! and shall they not prevail,
The seething surge, the gathering gale?
They fling their wild flag to the breeze,
The banner of a thousand seas!
They come, they mount, they charge in vain,
Thus far, incalculable main!
No more! thine hosts have not o’erthrown
The lichen on the barrier stone!
Have the rocks faith, that thus they stand
Unmoved, a grim and stately band,
And look, like warriors tried and brave,
Stern, silent, reckless, o’er the wave?
Have the proud billows thought and life
To feel the glory of the strife,
And trust one day, in battle bold,
To win the foeman’s haughty hold?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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