Acasto

And long has this defy'd the sages skill T'investigate: Tradition seems to hide The mighty secret from each mortal eye, How first these various nations South and North Possest these shores, or from what countries came; Whether they sprang from some premoeval head In their own lands, like Adam in the East; Yet this the sacred oracles deny, And reason too reclaims against the thought. For when the gen'ral deluge drown'd the world, Where could their tribes have found security? Where find their fate but in the ghastly deep? Unless, as others dream, some chosen few High on the Andes 'scap'd the gen'ral death, High on the Andes, wrapt in endless snow, Where winter in his wildest fury reigns. But here Philosophers oppose the scheme, The earth, say they, nor hills nor mountains knew E'er yet the universal flood prevail'd: But when the mighty waters rose aloft, Rous'd by the winds, they shook their solid case And in convulsions tore the drowned world! 'Till by the winds assuag'd they quickly fell And all their ragged bed exposed to view. Perhaps far wand'ring towards the northern pole, The straits of Zembla and the Frozen Zone, And where the eastern Greenland almost joins America's north point, the hardy tribes Of banish'd Jews, Siberians, Tartars wild Came over icy mountains, or on floats First reach'd these coasts hid from the world beside. And yet another argument more strange Reserv'd for men of deeper thought and late Presents Itself to view: In Peleg's days, So says the Hebrew seer's inspired pen, This mighty mass of earth, this solid globe Was cleft in twain--cleft east and west apart While strait between the deep Atlantic roll'd. And traces indisputable remain Of this unhappy land now sunk and lost; The islands rising in the eastern main Are but small fragments of this continent, Whose two extremities were Newfoundland And St. Helena.--One far in the north Where British seamen now with strange surprise Behold the pole star glitt'ring o'er their heads; The other in the southern tropic rears Its head above the waves; Bermudas and Canary isles, Britannia and th' Azores, With fam'd Hibernia are but broken parts Of some prodigious waste which once sustain'd Armies by lands, where now but ships can range.