Evangeline | Page 9

autumn the blood-red

Moon climbs the crystal walls of heaven, and o'er the horizon

Titan-like stretches its hundred hands upon mountain and meadow,

Seizing the rocks and the rivers, and piling huge shadows together.

Broader and ever broader it gleamed on the roofs of the village,

Gleamed on the sky and the sea, and the ships that lay in the roadstead.

Columns of shining smoke uprose, and flashes of flame were

Thrust through their folds and withdrawn, like the quivering hands of a
martyr.
Then as the wind seized the gleeds and the burning thatch,
and, uplifting,
Whirled them aloft through the air, at once from a
hundred house-tops
Started the sheeted smoke with flashes of flame
intermingled.
These things beheld in dismay the crowd on the shore and on shipboard.

Speechless at first they stood, then cried aloud in their anguish,

"We shall behold no more our homes in the village of Grand-Pre!"

Loud on a sudden the cocks began to crow in the farm-yards,

Thinking the day had dawned; and anon the lowing of cattle
Came on
the evening breeze, by the barking of dogs interrupted.
Then rose a
sound of dread, such as startles the sleeping encampments
Far in the

western prairies or forests that skirt the Nebraska,
When the wild
horses affrighted sweep by with the speed of the whirlwind,
Or the
loud bellowing herds of buffaloes rush to the river.
Such was the
sound that arose on the night, as the herds and the horses
Broke
through their folds and fences, and madly rushed o'er the meadows.
Overwhelmed with the sight, yet speechless, the priest and the maiden

Gazed on the scene of terror that reddened and widened before them;

And as they turned at length to speak to their silent companion,
Lo!
from his seat he had fallen, and stretched abroad on the sea-shore

Motionless lay his form, from which the soul had departed.
Slowly
the priest uplifted the lifeless head, and the maiden
Knelt at her
father's side, and wailed aloud in her terror.
Then in a swoon she sank,
and lay with her head on his bosom.
Through the long night she lay in
deep, oblivious slumber;
And when she woke from the trance, she
beheld a multitude near her.
Faces of friends she beheld, that were
mournfully gazing upon her,
Pallid, with tearful eyes, and looks of
saddest compassion.
Still the blaze of the burning village illumined
the landscape,
Reddened the sky overhead, and gleamed on the faces
around her,
And like the day of doom it seemed to her wavering
senses.
Then a familiar voice she heard, as it said to the people,--

"Let us bury him here by the sea. When a happier season
Brings us
again to our homes from the unknown land of our exile,
Then shall
his sacred dust be piously laid in the churchyard."
Such were the
words of the priest. And there in haste by the seaside,
Having the
glare of the burning village for funeral torches,
But without bell or
book, they buried the farmer of Grand-Pre.
And as the voice of the
priest repeated the service of sorrow,
Lo! with a mournful sound, like
the voice of a vast congregation,
Solemnly answered the sea, and
mingled its roar with the dirges.
'Twas the returning tide, that afar
from the waste of the ocean,
With the first dawn of the day, came
heaving and hurrying landward.
Then recommenced once more the
stir and noise of embarking;
And with the ebb of the tide the ships

sailed out of the harbor,
Leaving behind them the dead on the shore,
and the village in ruins.
PART THE SECOND.
I.
MANY a weary year had passed since the burning of Grand-Pre,

When on the falling tide the freighted vessels departed,
Bearing a
nation, with all its household gods, into exile,
Exile without an end,
and without an example in story.
Far asunder, on separate coasts, the
Acadians landed;
Scattered were they, like flakes of snow, when the
wind from the northeast
Strikes aslant through the fogs that darken
the Banks of Newfoundland.
Friendless, homeless, hopeless, they
wandered from city to city,
From the cold lakes of the North to sultry
Southern savannas,--
From the bleak shores of the sea to the lands
where the Father of Waters
Seizes the hills in his hands, and drags
them down to the ocean,
Deep in their sands to bury the scattered
bones of the mammoth.
Friends they sought and homes; and many,
despairing, heart-broken,
Asked of the earth but a grave, and no
longer a friend nor a fireside.
Written their history stands on tablets of
stone in the churchyards.
Long among them was seen a maiden who
waited and wandered,
Lowly and meek in spirit, and patiently
suffering all things.
Fair was she and young; but, alas! before her
extended,
Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its
pathway
Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and
suffered before her,
Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead
and abandoned,
As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is
marked by
Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the
sunshine.
Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect,