*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during aprolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From myforenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there,dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing ofunspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. Atintervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if toembrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it.
Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost insupernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abrahambefore the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, itswings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost themiserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed atthat prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things thatdarted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked asailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heardthat name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing isutterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learnedthat goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by nopossibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do withthose mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that birdupon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew thebird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectlyburnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the birdchiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced inthis, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called greyalbatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with suchemotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I willtell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on thesea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered,leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; andthen letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meantfor man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join thewing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that ofthe White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of athousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was theelected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in thosedays were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. Attheir flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen starwhich every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashingcascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested himwith housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could havefurnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of thatunfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers andhunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walkedmajestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed.
Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countlesscohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; orwhether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at thehorizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warmnostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect hepresented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the objectof trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from whatstands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was hisspiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; andthat this divineness had that in it which, though commandingworship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all thataccessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed andAlbatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and oftenshocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith andkin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed bythe name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men- has nosubstantive deformity- and yet this mere aspect of all-pervadingwhiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliestabortion. Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable butnot the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forcesthis crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, thegauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the WhiteSquall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human maliceomitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effectof that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol oftheir faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiffin the market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of allmankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. Itcannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspectof the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallorlingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like thebadge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidationhere. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hueof the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitionsdo we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; allghosts rising in a milk-white fog- Yea, while these terrors seizeus, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by theevangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
