The stillness of death broods o’er valley and mountain,
The snow lies below like a funeral shroud;
The clutch of the ice chokes the song of the fountain;
Starry eyes from the skies dimly gleam through each cloud;
When, hark! on the hard, frozen earth strikes the thunder
Of fast-falling hoof-beats with sonorous sound,
Scared villagers waken in somnolent wonder,
The sentinel checks his monotonous round.
Ho! Governor, let not thy dreamings encumber
With pause the swift flight of yon messenger’s wing,
For fatal the stay thou wouldst cause by thy slumber,
The horseman who rides with the Emperor’s ring.
Fresh horse and new pistols—some phrases of warning,
Few and brief, to the chief, and the fort is behind,
And away in the gray of the slow-dawning morning
Flies his steed with the speed of the fierce northern wind.
Out, out through the forests—on, on o’er the meadows,
While castle and cabin and hamlet and town
Rise and fall, come and go, past his vision like shadows.
With white snowy robes over bosoms of brown,
The woodcutter leaps from his path with a shiver;
To their babes, in mute terror, the pale mothers cling;
And the gray-coated hero salutes with a quiver
The ominous flash of the Emperor’s ring.
Some guess, but none question, the message he carries,
All divine by the sign ’tis of life or of death;
And woe to the wretch through whose folly he tarries;
Better Fate, with grim hate, strangled out his first breath,
For earth has no cavern to shield and defend him,
Nor ocean a sheltering island so far
As to hide from the scourge that will torture and rend him,
Whose blunder or crime has enraged the White Czar.
So serf and proud baron, so moujik and banker
Keep aside, unless aid to his mission you bring.
Speed him on, and rejoice when you earn not the rancor
Of one who bears with him the Emperor’s ring.
We Russians are brave, but we only are human;
We cower at a power it is death to offend,
Even Ivan, the bear-killer, shrinks like a woman
From frown of a clown with Alexis as friend.
The wolves on our steppes are a thousand times bolder;
Peer and peasant alike for their banquets they claim;
The blood in yon courtier’s veins may be colder
Than the serfs, but ’twill serve for their feast all the same.
Out there in the solitude, silent and lonely,
These prowlers of night know but Hunger as king.
And the Cossacks may find of that messenger only
A few whitened bones and the Emperor’s ring.