or heroism. He is a martyr to the physical as well as to the
spiritual pain of the world. He communicates to us, not only the horror
of humiliation, but the horror of a numbed boy, "cut to the ghost" by
the polar gale, as high in the yards Dauber fights against the ship's
doom, having been

ordered up when sails and spars
Were flying and going mad among the stars,

How well, too, he imparts the dread and the danger of the coming storm,
as the ship gets nearer the Horn:

All through the windless night the clipper rolled
In a great swell with oily gradual heaves,
Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled,
Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.

And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters:

Like the march of doom
Came those great powers of marching silences;
Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas.

The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the ship
seemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out into
the impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters:

She bayed there like a solitary hound
Lost in a covert.

Morning came, bringing no release from fear:

So the night passed, but then no morning broke--
Only a something showed that night was dead.
A sea-bird, cackling like a devil, spoke,
And the fog drew away and hung like lead.
Like mighty cliffs it shaped, sullen and red;
Like glowering gods at watch it did appear,
And sometimes drew away, and then drew near.

Then suddenly swooped down the immense black fiend of the storm,
catching, as the Bosun put it, the ship "in her ball-dress."

The blackness crunched all memory of the sun.

Henceforth we have a tale of white fear changing into heroism as Dauber
clambers to his giddy place in the rigging, and goes out on the yard to
his task,

Sick at the mighty space of air displayed
Below his feet, where soaring birds were wheeling.

It was all a "withering rush of death," an orgy of snow, ice, and
howling seas.

The snow whirled, the ship bowed to it, the gear lashed,
The sea-tops were cut off and flung down smashed;
Tatters of shouts were flung, the rags of yells--
And clang, clang, clang, below beat the two bells.

How magnificent a flash of the fury of the storm we get when the Dauber
looks down from his scramblings among rigging and snapped spars, and
s