Sail forth into the sea of life, O gentle, loving, trusting wife, And safe from all adversity Upon the bosom of that sea Thy comings and thy goings be! For gentleness and love and trust Prevail o'er angry wave and gust; And in the wreck of noble lives Something immortal still survives! Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee,--are all with thee! _Longfellow._ XC THE DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH CAPE Othere, the old sea-captain, Who dwelt in Helgoland, To King Alfred, the Lover of Truth, Brought a snow-white walrus-tooth, Which he held in his brown right hand. His figure was tall and stately, Like a boy's his eye appeared; His hair was yellow as hay, But threads of a silvery grey Gleamed in his tawny beard. Hearty and hale was Othere, His cheek had the colour of oak; With a kind of laugh in his speech, Like the sea-tide on a beach, As unto the king he spoke. And Alfred, King of the Saxons, Had a book upon his knees, And wrote down the wondrous tale Of him who was first to sail Into the Arctic seas. 'So far I live to the northward, No man lives north of me; To the east are wild mountain-chains, And beyond them meres and plains; To the westward all is sea. So far I live to the northward, From the harbour of Skeringes-hale, If you only sailed by day With a fair wind all the way, More than a month would you sail. I own six hundred reindeer, With sheep and swine beside; I have tribute from the Finns, Whalebone and reindeer-skins, And ropes of walrus-hide. I ploughed the land with horses, But my heart was ill at ease, For the old seafaring men Came to me now and then, With their sagas of the seas;-- Of Iceland and of Greenland, And the stormy Hebrides, And the undiscovered deep;-- I could not eat nor sleep For thinking of those seas. To the northward stretched the desert, How far I fain would know; So at last I sallied forth, And three days sailed due north, As far as the whale-ships go.