Giant Hours with Poet Preachers Part 14

The Spell of the Yukon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROBERT SERVICE.]

Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who read:

"The summer--no sweeter was ever, The suns.h.i.+ny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river, The bighorn asleep on the hill; The strong life that never knows harness, The wilds where the caribou call; The freedom, the freshness, the farness; O G.o.d! how I'm stuck on it all!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to love of G.o.d through the height and the might of all that he sees, with a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows:

"Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro, Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be the last to go.

"Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand, Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to G.o.d:

"But the stars throng out in their glory, And they sing of the G.o.d in man; They sing of the Mighty Master, Of the loom his fingers span, Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole, And weft in the wondrous plan.

"Here by the camp-fire's flicker, Deep in my blanket curled, I long for the peace of the pine-gloom, Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled, And the wind and the wave are silent, And world is singing to world."

The Spell of the Yukon.

"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:

"Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?

'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do things!"--the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great needs:

"The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things--."

The Spell of the Yukon.

SIN AND DEATH

The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"

"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting; It's luring me on as of old; Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold.

It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Or another verse:

"I wanted the gold, and I sought it; I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it; I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it-- Came out with a fortune last fall-- Yet somehow life's not what I thought it, And somehow the gold isn't all."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Who has not learned that? Thank G.o.d for the lesson! Too many of us hurl our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,

"All you can take in your cold, dead hand Is what you have given away."

And how the warning against sin hurtles its way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power:

"It grips you like some kinds of sinning; It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it's been since the beginning; It seems it will be to the end."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you."

Service says the same thing in "It grips you."

G.o.d AND HEAVEN

Maybe you have never thought of G.o.d as the G.o.d of the trails and Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The G.o.d of the trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave G.o.d out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed, these are the very men who know G.o.d, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"?

"I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings; It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the timeless things, And to-night, O, G.o.d of the trails untrod, how it whines in my heart-strings!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

This G.o.d leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker:

"Thank G.o.d! there is always a Land of Beyond For us who are true to the trail; A vision to seek, a beckoning peak, A farness that never will fail; A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal, A manhood that irks at a bond, And try how we will, unattainable still, Behold it, our Land of Beyond!"

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at every jump from cake to floe, at every step of every trail:

JUST THINK!

"Just think! some night the stars will gleam Upon a cold, grey stone, And trace a name with silver beam, And lo! 'twill be your own,

"That night is speeding on to greet Your epitaphic rhyme.

Your life is but a little beat Within the heart of Time.

"A little gain, a little pain, A laugh lest you may moan; A little blame, a little fame, A star-gleam on a stone."

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

Perhaps it is because the men of the north are always so near to death and so conscious of death that they hold to the strict Puritanical rules of conduct that they do, expressed in Service's "The Woman and the Angel," that story of the Angel who came down to earth and withstood all the temptations until he met the beautiful, sinning woman, and who was about to fall. Hear her tempt him: