An Indian Cowrie (Found in a Cornish Barrow at the Land's End)

A GENTLE creature grewWithin this cell of pearly blue—How many centuries agoNo seer can tell us. We can only knowIt found life pleasant, moved, and took its easeBy palmy island shores in distant Indian seas.

The world has changed since then!Tongues have died out; and tribes of menHave clamoured, and have passed away,Like crow-flights through the sunset of a day;No pillar marks where gorgeous cities fell;But this small speechless life hath left its storied shell.

What matters now to seekHow man in that dim dawn antiqueFirst owned it; whether fisher spreadHis snare of palm-tree leaves and baited thread,Or leaf-girt negress, whistling in her speech,Gathered an empty husk upon a tangled beach?

It profits not; and yet,Methinks, some cave-dwarf, carved in jet,With blubber lips and woolly hair,Wagged a huge head, as at some Aryan fair,He bartered for a shred, a copper bead,This shell, whose story is a world's, could we but read.

How many a kindred handHath, as it passed from land to land,Touched it, and left a pulse to thrillThe Aryan blood which leaps within us still;What memories of all that then befellAre, like an Iliad, shut within this little shell!

Apply it to your ear. And listen!—No, you cannot hear;Yet how the arrow-heads of stoneSang; how the bronze swords rang; how shriek and groanFollowed the stone celt's thud, as wave by wave,The Aryan exodus for ever westward drave?

For ever westward! NewWild worlds still opened; but the BlueThat brooded o'er them was the sameUnchanging God that brooded whence they came.For ever westward! And the shell was castWestward; and great fresh waves still swept beyond the last.

Across the infinite plainsWhite cattle draw the lumbering wains;Huge lop-eared mastiffs guard and keepThe silky goats and heavy horned sheep;Dark lines of life crawl where the great lakes shine,And close against the sunset creeps a fainter line.

The rosy peaks of snowArise, and like a pageant go;Primeval forest, pathless fen,Dragons, and hordes of brutal-visaged menFleet past; and ever where the dark lines turn,In sudden fields of wheat the scarlet poppies burn.

Hark! in the dead of night,What cries are these? What crimson lightLeaps o'er the mere, and redly streaksThe snowy pine-wood and the icy peaks?What splashing paddles these? - the morn will breakOn tree-piled hovels smouldering in an Alpine lake.

Still westward! And the sun,Burning o'er Jutland, has begunTo bleach the many-cycled firs!A fresher life-sap through the forest stirs,And tall and green the little oaks have grownRound the Bronze Man at death-grips with the Man of Stone!

What year was it that blewThe Aryan's wicker-work canoeWhich brought the shell to English land?What prehistoric man or woman's hand,With what intent, consigned it to this grave—This barrow set in sound of the Ancient World's last wave?

Beside it in the moundA charmed bead of flint was found.Some woman surely in this place,Covered with flowers a little baby-face,And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast;And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?

Was it a jewel meantTo mark deep love or high descent;A many-virtued amulet;A sign to know the child by when they met;A coin for that last journey through the night—A coin of little worth, a childless widow's mite?

No man shall ever know!It happened all so long agoThat this same childless woman mayHave stood upon the cliffs around the bayAnd watched for tin-ships that no longer came,Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman flame.