by Mrs. Abbie Ransom

The Path Along the Bluff

SOME EIGHTY YEARS ago, Mrs. Abbie Ransom, of Nantucket, wrote a tribute to that unique "Path Along The Bluff," which runs from the village of'Sconset to the lighthouse at Sankaty Head, in the form of a poem which reads as follows:

Have you followed the path along the bluff When the sky is gray and the sea is rough, When, shoreward thickening, the fog drifts down 'Till homes are the wraiths of a phantom town?

Have your feet marked time with the martial surge, Your gaze been fixed where the rider winds urge Their swift horses on, unfettered and free, Whipping the rack from the crest of the sea?

Do you know the path when the moon roams high Her wonder course in a fathomless sky, And her silver sheen on the sea is spread Like lilies of love o'er the wave-tombed dead?

Or again when the moorlands stretch away, In the golden glow of an August day, When the very air is a rhapsody Of the Past, the Now, and the Yet-to-be?

I have followed the path to Sankaty Light When the moors were brown and the frost was white, With the sun a ball on the ocean's rim, Where the Indian summer breathed with him.

From the north to the south a circle swept, On the far horizon a soft haze slept; To the west the moorlands; above, the sky; In all the vast silence, just God and I.