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(From Mogg Megone, Part II)
FAR eastward o’er the lovely bay, | |
| Penobscot’s clustered wigwams lay; | |
| And gently from that Indian town | |
| The verdant hillside slopes adown, | |
| To where the sparkling waters play | 5 |
| Upon the yellow sands below; | |
| And shooting round the winding shores | |
| Of narrow capes, and isles which lie | |
| Slumbering to ocean’s lullaby,— | |
| With birchen boat and glancing oars, | 10 |
| The red men to their fishing go; | |
| While from their planting ground is borne | |
| The treasure of the golden corn, | |
| By laughing girls, whose dark eyes glow | |
| Wild through the locks which o’er them flow. | 15 |
| The wrinkled squaw, whose toil is done, | |
| Sits on her bear-skin in the sun. | |
| Watching the huskers, with a smile | |
| For each full ear which swells the pile; | |
| And the old chief, who nevermore | 20 |
| May bend the bow or pull the oar, | |
| Smokes gravely in his wigwam door, | |
| Or slowly shapes, with axe of stone, | |
| The arrow-head from flint and bone. | |
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| Beneath the westward turning eye | 25 |
| A thousand wooded islands lie,— | |
| Gems of the waters!—with each hue | |
| Of brightness set in ocean’s blue. | |
| Each bears aloft its tuft of trees | |
| Touched by the pencil of the frost, | 30 |
| And, with the motion of each breeze, | |
| A moment seen,—a moment lost,— | |
| Changing and blent, confused and tossed, | |
| The brighter with the darker crossed | |
| Their thousand tints of beauty glow | 35 |
| Down in the restless waves below, | |
| And tremble in the sunny skies, | |
| As if, from waving bough to bough, | |
| Flitted the birds of paradise. | |
| There sleep Placentia’s group,—and there | 40 |
| Père Breteaux marks the hour of prayer; | |
| And there, beneath the sea-worn cliff, | |
| On which the Father’s hut is seen, | |
| The Indian stays his rocking skiff, | |
| And peers the hemlock-boughs between, | 45 |
| Half trembling, as he seeks to look | |
| Upon the Jesuit’s Cross and Book. | |
| There, gloomily against the sky | |
| The Dark Isles rear their summits high; | |
| And Desert Rock, abrupt and bare, | 50 |
| Lifts its gray turrets in the air,— | |
| Seen from afar, like some stronghold | |
| Built by the ocean kings of old; | |
| And, faint as smoke-wreath white and thin, | |
| Swells in the north vast Katahdin: | 55 |
| And, wandering from its marshy feet, | |
| The broad Penobscot comes to meet | |
| And mingle with his own bright bay. | |
| Slow sweep his dark and gathering floods, | |
| Arched over by the ancient woods, | 60 |
| Which Time, in those dim solitudes, | |
| Wielding the dull axe of Decay, | |
| Alone hath ever shorn away. | |
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