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width="320" />But how had the mystic thing been caught?
Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the
fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a
lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place;
and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant
for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the
wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous
in our Western annals and
traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent
milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the
dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was
the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their
flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every
evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the
curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent
than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and
archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the
eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval
times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as
this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van
of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an
Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at
the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils
reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented
himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling
reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary
record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly,
which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in
it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain
nameless terror.
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But there are other instances where
this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it
in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is itNor, in
that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as
that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness
which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is
as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere
aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than
the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
quite other aspects, does Nature
text in her least palpable but not the less malicious agencies,
fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible.
From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been
denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art
of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens
the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol
of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff
in the market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common,
hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the
supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one
visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is
the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much
like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal
trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the
expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our
superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors
seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by
the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his
other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by
whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance
it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.