14

Or plying, in the dews of morn, Her hoe amidst thy patch of corn, Or offering up, at eve, to thee, Thy birchen dish of hominy!"

From the rude board of Bonython,
Venison and succotash have gone,-
For long these dwellers of the wood
Have felt the knawing want of food.
But untasted of Ruth is the frugal cheer,-
With head averted, yet ready ear,
She stands by the side of her austere sire,
Feeding, at times, the unequal fire
With the yellow knots of the pitch-pine tree,
Whose flaring light, as they kindle, falls
On the cottage-roof, and its black log walls,
And over its inmates three.

From Sagamore Bonython's hunting flask

The fire-water burns at the lip of Megone: "Will the Sachem hear what his father shall ask? Will he make his mark, that it may be known, On the speaking-leaf, that he gives the land, From the Sachem's own, to his father's hand?" The fire-water shines in the Indian's eyes,

As he rises, the white man's bidding to do: "Wuttamuttata-weekan!" Mogg is wise,— For the water he drinks is strong and new,Mogg's heart is great!-will he shut his hand, When his father asks for a little land?"With unsteady fingers, the Indian has drawn On the parchment the shape of a hunter's bow, "Boon water,-boon water,-Sagamore John! Wuttamuttata-weekan! our hearts will grow!" He drinks yet deeper, he mutters low, He reels on his bear-skin to and fro,His head falls down on his naked breast, — He struggles, and sinks to a drunken rest.

"Humph-drunk as a beast!"--and Bonython's brow

Is darker than ever with evil thought-
"The fool has signed his warrant; but how
And when shall the deed be wrought?
Speak, Ruth! why, what the devil is there,
To fix thy gaze in that empty air?-
Speak, Ruth! by my soul, if I thought that tear,
Which shames thyself and our purpose here,
Were shed for that cursed and pale-faced dog,
Whose green scalp hangs from the belt of Mogg,
And whose beastly soul is in Satan's keeping.
Tais-this!"-he dashes his hand upon
The rattling stock of his loaded gun,-
"Should send thee with him to do thy weeping!"

"Father!"-the eye of Bonython
Sinks at that low, sepulchral tone,
Hollow and deep, as it were spoken
By the unmoving tongue of death,-
Or from some statue's lips had broken,-
A sound without a breath!
"Father!-my life I value less
Than yonder fool his gaudy dress;
And how it ends it matters not,
By heart-break or by rifle-shot;
But spare awhile the scoff and threat,-
Our business is not finished yet."

"True, true, my girl,-I only meant
To draw up again the bow unbent.
Harm thee, my Ruth! I only sought
To frighten off thy gloomy thought;
Come, let's be friends!" He seeks to clasp
His daughter's cold, damp hand in his.
Ruth startles from her father's grasp,
As if each nerve and muscle felt,
Instinctively, the touch of guilt,
Through all their subtle sympathies.

He points her to the sleeping Mogg:
"What shall be done with yonder dog?
Scamman is dead, and revenge is thine,-
The deed is signed and the land is mine;

And this drunken fool is of use no more,
Save as thy hopeful bridegroom, and sooth,
"T were Christian mercy to finish him, Ruth,
Now, while he lies like a beast on our floor,-
If not for thine, at least for his sake,
Rather than let the poor dog awake

To drain my flask, and claim as his bride Such a forest devil to run by his side,Such a Wetuomanit12 as thou wouldst make!"

He laughs at his jest. Hush-what is there ?—
The sleeping Indian is striving to rise,
With his knife in his hand, and glaring eyes!
"Wagh!-Mogg will have the pale-face's hair,

For his knife is sharp, and his fingers can help
The hair to pull and the skin to peel,
Let him cry like a woman and twist like an eel,
The great Captain Scamman must lose his
scalp!

And Ruth, when she sees it, shall dance with
Mogg.

His eyes are fixed,-but his lips draw in.-
With a low, hoarse chuckle, and fiendish grin,-
And he sinks again, like a senseless log

Ruth does not speak,-she does not stir;
But she gazes down on the murderer,
Whose broken and dreamful slumbers tell
Too much for her ear of that deed of hell.

She sees the knife, with its slaughter red,
And the dark fingers clenching the bearskin bed!
What thoughts of horror and madness whirl
Through the burning brain of that fallen girl!

John Bonython lifts his gun to his eye,

Its muzzle is close to the Indian's ear,—
But he drops it again. "Some one may be nigh,
And I would not, that even the wolves should
hear."

He draws his knife from its deer-skin belt,-
Its edge with his fingers is slowly felt ;-
Kneeling down on one knee, by the Indian's side,
From his throat he opens the blanket wide;
And twice or thrice he feebly essays

A trembling hand with the knife to raise.

64

My life from a cold and wintry grave,
I cannot," he mutters,-" did he not save

When the storm came down from Agioochook, And the north-wind howled, and the tree-tops shook,

And I strove, in the drifts of the rushing snow, Till my knees grew weak and I could not go, And I felt the cold to my vitals creep,

And my heart's blood stiffen, and pulses sleep!

I cannot strike him-Ruth Bonython!

In the Devil's name, tell me-what's to be done?"

O, when the soul, once pure and high,
Is stricken down from Virtue's sky,
As, with the downcast star of morn,
Some gems of light are with it drawn,-
And, through its night of darkness, play
Some tokens of its primal day,-
Some lofty feelings linger still,-

The strength to dare, the nerve to meet
Whatever threatens with defeat

Its all-indomitable will!—
But lacks the mean of mind and heart,
Though eager for the gains of crime,
Oft, at his chosen place and time,
The strength to bear his evil part;
And, shielded by his very vice,
Escapes from Crime by Cowardice.

Ruth starts erect, -with bloodshot eye, And lips drawn tight across her teeth, Showing their locked embrace beneath, In the red firelight:-" Mogg must die! Give me the knife!"-The outlaw turns,

Shuddering in heart and limb, away,— But, fitfully there, the hearth-fire burns,

And he sees on the wall strange shadows play. A lifted arm, a tremulous blade,

Are dimly pictured in light and shade,

Plunging down in the darkness. Hark, that

cry

Again and again-he sees it fall,—

That shadowy arm down the lighted wall!

He hears quick footsteps-a shape flits byThe door on its rusted hinges creaks:"Ruth-daughter Ruth!" the outlaw shrieks. But no sound comes back, he is standing alone By the mangled corse of Mogg Megone!

PART II.

"T 18 morning over Norridgewock,-
On tree and wigwam, wave and rock.
Bathed in the autumnal sunshine, stirred
At intervals by breeze and bird,
And wearing all the hues which glow
In heaven's own pure and perfect bow,
That glorious picture of the air,
Which summer's light-robed angel forms
On the dark ground of fading storms,
With pencil dipped in sunbeams there,-
And, stretching out, on either hand,
O'er all that wide and unshorn land,
Till, weary of its gorgeousness,
The aching and the dazzled eye
Rests, gladdened, on the calm blue sky,—
Slumbers the mighty wilderness!
The oak, upon the windy hill,

Its dark green burthen upward heaves-
The hemlock broods above its rill,
Its cone-like foliage darker still,

Against the birch's graceful stem,
And the rough walnut-bough receives
The sun upon its crowded leaves,

Each colored like a topaz gem;
And the tall maple wears with them
The coronal, which autumn gives,

The brief, bright sign of ruin near,
The hectic of a dying year!

13

The hermit priest, who lingers now
On the Bald Mountain's shrubless brow,
The gray and thunder-smitten pile
Which marks afar the Desert Isle,1
While gazing on the scene below,
May half forget the dreams of home,
That nightly with his slumbers come,-
The tranquil skies of sunny France,
The peasant's harvest song and dance,
The vines around the hillsides wreathing
The soft airs midst their clusters breathing,
The wings which dipped, the stars which shone
Within thy bosom, blue Garonne !
And round the Abbey's shadowed wall,
At morning spring and even-fall,

Sweet voices in the still air singing,-
The chant of many a holy hymn,-

The solemn bell of vespers ringing,-
And hallowed torchlight falling dim
On pictured saint and seraphim!
For here beneath him lies unrolled,
Bathed deep in morning's flood of gold,
A vision gorgeous as the dream
Of the beatified may seem,

When, as his Church's legends say,
Borne upward in ecstatic bliss,

The rapt enthusiast soars away Unto a brighter world than this:

A mortal's glimpse beyond the pale,-
A moment's lifting of the veil !

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
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,
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.
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
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.

Beneath the westward turning eye
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,
And, with the motion of each breeze,
A moment seen,—a moment lost,
Changing and blent, confused and tossed,
The brighter with the darker crosse
Their thousand tints of beauty glow
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 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,
Half trembling, as he seeks to look
Upon the Jesuit's Cross and Book. 14
There, gloomily against the sky

The Dark Isles rear their summits high;
And Desert Rock, abrupt and bare,
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 :
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,
Which Time, in those dim solitudes,

Wielding the dull axe of Decay,
Alone hath ever shorn away.

Not thus, within the woods which hide
The beauty of thy azure tide,

And with their falling timbers block
Thy broken currents, Kennebec !
Gazes the white man on the wreck

Of the down-trodden Norridgewock,―
In one lone village hemmed at length,
In battle shorn of half their strength,
Turned, like the panther in his lair,
With his fast-flowing life-blood wet,
For one last struggle of despair,

Wounded and faint, but tameless yet!

-no song:

Unreaped, upon the planting lands,
The scant, neglected harvest stands:
No shout is there,-no dance,-
The aspect of the very child
Scowls with a meaning sad and wild
Of bitterness and wrong.
The almost infant Norridgewock
Essays to lift the tomahawk;
And plucks his father's knife away,
To mimic, in his frightful play,

The scalping of an English foe:
Wreathes on his lip a horrid smile,
Burns, like a snake's, his small eye, while
Some bough or sapling meets his blow.
The fisher, as he drops his line,
Starts, when he sees the hazels quiver
Along the margin of the river,

Looks up and down the rippling tide,
And grasps the firelock at his side.
For Bomazeen 15 from Tacconock
Has sent his runners to Norridgewock

With tidings that Moulton and Harmon of York
Far up the river have come:

They have left their boats,-they have entered the wood,

And filled the depths of the solitude

With the sound of the ranger's drum.

On the brow of a hill, which slopes to meet
The dowing river, and bathe its feet,--
The bare-washed rock, and the drooping grass,
And the creeping vine, as the waters pass, -
A rude and unshapely chapel stands,
Built up in that wild by unskilled hands,
Yet the traveller knows it a place of prayer,
For the holy sign of the cross is there:
And should he chance at that place to be,
Of a Sabbath morn, or some hallowed day,
When prayers are made and masses are said,
Some for the living and some for the dead,
Well might that traveller start to see

The tall dark forms, that take their way
From the birch canoe, on the river-shore,
And the forest paths, to that chapel door;
And marvel to mark the naked knees

And the dusky foreheads bending there,
While, in coarse white vesture, over these
In blessing or in prayer,
Stretching abroad his thin pale hands,
Like a shrouded ghost, the Jesuit stands.

Two forms are now in that chapel dim,
The Jesuit, silent and sad and pale,
Anxiously heeding some fearful tale,
Which a stranger is telling him.
That stranger's garb is soiled and torn,
And wet with dew and loosely worn;
Her fair neglected hair falls down

O'er cheeks with wind and sunshine brown;
Yet still, in that disordered face,
The Jesuit's cautious eye can trace
Those elements of former grace
Wuich, half effaced, seem scarcely less,
Even now, than perfect loveliness.

With drooping head, and voice so low

That scarce it meets the Jesuit's ears,-
While through her clasped fingers flow,
From the heart's fountain, hot and slow,
Her penitential tears, -

She tells the story of the woe
And evil of her years.

The fires of guilt more fiercely burn
Beneath its holy smile;

For half I fancy I can see

My mother's sainted look in thee.

"My dear lost mother! sad and pale Mournfully sinking day by day, And with a hold on life as frail

As frosted leaves, that, thin and gray,
Hang feebly on their parent spray,
And tremble in the gale;

Yet watching o'er my childishness
With patient fondness, not the less
For all the agony which kept
Her blue eye wakeful, while I slept;
And checking every tear and groan
That haply might have waked my own,
And bearing still, without offence,
My idle words, and petulance;

Reproving with a tear,-and, while
The tooth of pain was keenly preying
Upon her very heart, repaying

My brief repentance with a smile.

"O, in her meek, forgiving eye

There was a brightness not of mirth,
A light whose clear intensity

Was borrowed not of earth.
Along her cheek a deepening red
Told where the feverish hectic fed;
And yet, each fatal token gave
To the mild beauty of her face
A newer and a dearer grace,

Unwarning of the grave.

'T was like the hue which Autumn gives
To yonder changed and dying leaves,

Breathed over by her frosty breath;
Scarce can the gazer feel that this
Is but the spoiler's treacherous kiss,
The mocking-smile of Death!

"Sweet were the tales she used to tell
When summer's eve was dear to us,
And, fading from the darkening dell,
The glory of the sunset fell

On wooded Agamenticus,-
When, sitting by our cottage wall,
The murmur of the Saco's fall,

And the south-wind's expiring sighs, Came, softly blending, on my ear, With the low tones I loved to hear:

Tales of the pure, --the good, -the wise,-
The holy men and maids of old,
In the all-sacred pages told ;---

Of Rachel, stooped at Haran's fountains,
Amid her father's thirsty flock,
Beautiful to her kinsman seeming
As the bright angels of his dreaming,
On Padan-aran's holy rock;
Of gentle Ruth,—and her who kept
Her awful vigil on the mountains,
By Israel's virgin daughters wept;
Of Miriam, with her maidens, singing
The song for grateful Israel meet,
While every crimson wave was bringing
The spoils of Egypt at her feet;
Of her, Samaria's humble daughter,
Who paused to hear, beside her well,
Lessons of love and truth, which fell
Softly as Shiloh's flowing water;

And saw, beneath his pilgrim guise,
The Promised One, so long foretold
By holy seer and bard of old,

Revealed before her wondering eyes!

"Slowly she faded. Day by day
Her step grew weaker in our hall,
And fainter, at each even-fall,
Her sad voice died away.
Yet on her thin, pale lip, the while,

Sat Resignation's holy smile:

And even my father checked his tread,
And hushed his voice, beside her bed:
Beneath the calm and sad rebuke
Of her meek eye's imploring look,
The scowl of hate his brow forsook,
And in his stern and gloomy eye,
At times, a few unwonted tears
Wet the dark lashes, which for years
Hatred and pride had kept so dry.

"Calm as a child to slumber soothed,
As if an angel's hand had smoothed

The still, white features into rest, Silent and cold, without a breath

To stir the drapery on her breast, Pain, with its keen and poisoned fang, The horror of the mortal pang, The suffering look her brow had worn, The fear, the strife, the anguish gone,She slept at last in death!

"O, tell me, father, can the dead
Walk on earth, and look on us,
And lay upon the living's head

Their blessing or their curse?
For, O, last night she stood by me,
As I lay beneath the woodland tree!"

The Jesuit crosses himself in awe,-
"Jesu! what was it my daughter saw?"

"She came to me last night.

The dried leaves did not feel her tread;
She stood by me in the wan moonlight,
In the white robes of the dead!
Pale, and very mournfully

She bent her light form over me.
I heard no sound, I felt no breath

Breathe o'er me from that face of death:
Its blue eyes rested on my own,
Rayless and cold as eyes of stone;
Yet, in their fixed, unchanging gaze,
Something, which spoke of early days,-
A sadness in their quiet glare,

As if love's smile were frozen there,-
Came o'er me with an icy thrill;
O God! I feel its presence still!

The Jesuit makes, the holy sign,

How passed the vision, daughter mine?"

All dimly in the wan moonshine,

As a wreath of mist will twist and twine,
And scatter, and melt into the light,-
So scattering,-melting on my sight,
The pale, cold vision passed;

But those sad eyes were fixed on mine
Mournfully to the last."

"God help thee, daughter, tell me why
That spirit passed before thine eye!"

"Father, I know not, save it be

That deeds of mine have summoned her
From the unbreathing sepulchre,
To leave her last rebuke with me.
Ah, woe for me! my mother died
Just at the moment when I stood
Close on the verge of womanhood,
A child in everything beside;
And when my wild heart needed most
Her gentle counsels, they were lost.

"My father lived a stormy life,
Of frequent change and daily strife;
And-God forgive him!-left his child
To feel, like him, a freedom wild;
To love the red man's dwelling-place,
The birch boat on his shaded floods,
The wild excitement of the chase

Sweeping the ancient woods,

The camp-tire, blazing on the shore
Of the still lakes, the clear stream where
The idle fisher sets his wear,

Or angles in the shade, far more
Than that restraining awe I felt
Beneath my gentle mother's care,

When nightly at her knee I knelt,
With childhood's simple prayer.

"There came a change. The wild, glad mood
Of unchecked freedom passed.
Amid the ancient solitude

Of unshorn grass and waving wood,
And waters glancing bright and fast,
A softened voice was in my ear,

Sweet as those lulling sounds and fine
The hunter lifts his head to hear,
Now far and faint, now full and near-
The murmur of the wind-swept pine.

A manly form was ever nigh,

A bold, free hunter, with an eye

Whose dark, keen glance had power to wake, Both fear and love,-to awe and charm;

'Twas as the wizard rattlesnake,

Whose evil glances lure to harm

Whose cold and small and glittering eye,

And brilliant coil, and changing dye,

Draw, step by step, the gazer near,
With drooping wing and cry of fear,
Yet powerless all to turn away,
A conscious, but a willing prey!

"Fear, doubt, thought, life itself, ere long Merged in one feeling deep and strong. Faded the world which I had known,

A poor vain shadow, cold and waste;
In the warm pleasant bliss alone
Seemed I of actual life to taste.
Fond longings dimly understood,
The glow of passion's quickening blood,
And cherished fantasies which press
The young lip with a dream's caress,—
The heart's forecast and prophecy
Took form and life before my eye,
Seen in the glance which met my own,
Heard in the soft and pleading tone,
Felt in the arms around me cast,
And warm heart-pulses beating fast.
Ah! scarcely yet to God above
With deeper trust, with stronger love,
Has prayerful saint his meek heart lent,
Or cloistered nun at twilight bent,
Than I, before a human shrine,
As mortal and as frail as mine,

With heart, and soul, and mind, and form,
Knelt madly to a fellow-worm.

"Full soon, upon that dream of sin,
An awful light came bursting in.
The shrine was cold at which I knelt,
The idol of that shrine was gone;
A humbled thing of shame and guilt,
Outcast, and spurned and lone,
Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,
With withering heart and burning brain,
And tears that fell like fiery rain,

I passed a fearful time.

"There came a voice-it checked the tearIn heart and soul it wrought a change;My father's voice was in my ear;

It whispered of revenge!
A new and fiercer feeling swept
All lingering tenderness away;
And tiger passions, which had slept
In childhood's better day,
Unknown, unfelt, arose at length
In all their own demoniac strength.

18

"A youthful warrior of the wild,
By words deceived, by smiles beguiled,
Of crime the cheated instrument,
Upon our fatal errands went.

Through camp and town and wilderness
He tracked his victim; and, at last,
Just when the tide of hate had passed,
And milder thoughts came warm and fast,
Exhulting, at my feet he cast

The bloody token of success.

"O God! with what an awful power

I saw the buried past uprise, And gather, in a single hour,

Its ghost-like memories!

And then I felt-alas! too late-
Then underneath the mask of hate,

That shame and guilt and wrong had thrown
O'er feelings which they might not own,

The heart's wild love had known no change;
And still that deep and hidden love,
With its first fondness, wept above

The victim of its own revenge!
There lay the fearful scalp, and there
The blood was on its pale brown hair!
I thought not of the victim's scorn,

I thought not of his baleful guile,
My deadly wrong, my outcast name,
The characters of sin and shame
On heart and forehead drawn ;

I only saw that victim's smile,

The still, green places where we met,-
The moonlit branches, dewy wet;

I only felt, I only heard

The greeting and the parting word,—

The smile,-the embrace,-the tone, which made

An Eden of the forest shade.

"And oh, with what a loathing eye, With what a deadly hate and deep,

I saw that Indian murderer lie

Before me, in his drunken sleep! What though for me the deed was done, And words of mine had sped him on ! Yet when he murmured, as he slept,

The horrors of that deed of blood, The tide of utter madness swept

O'er brain and bosom, like a flood. And, father, with this hand of mine-" "Ha! what didst thou?" the Jesuit cries, Shuddering, as smitten with sudden pain,

And shading, with one thin hand, his eyes, With the other he makes the holy sign. "I smote him as I would a worm ; With heart as steeled, with nerves as firm: He never woke again!

"Woman of sin and blood and shame, Speak, I would know that victim's name."

"Father," she gasped, "a chieftain, known As Saco's Sachem,-MOGG MEGONE!"

Pale priest! What proud and lofty dreams,
What keen desires, what cherished schemes,
What hopes, that time may not recall,
Are darkened by that chieftain's fall!
Was he not pledged, by cross and vow,
To lift the hatchet of his sire,
And, round his own, the Church's foe,
To light the avenging fire?
Who now the Tarrantine shall wake,
For thine and for the Church's sake?
Who summon to the scene
Of conquest and unsparing strife,
And vengeance dearer than his life,
The fiery-souled Castine? 17

Three backward steps the Jesuit takes,-
His long thin frame as ague shakes;
And loathing hate is in his eye,

Ever thus the spirit must,

Guilty in the sight of Heaven, With a keener woe be riven, For its weak and sinful trust In the strength of human dust; And its anguish thrill afresh, For each vain reliance given To the failing arm of flesh.

PART III.

AH, weary Priest !-with pale hands pressed
On thy throbbing brow of pain,
Baffled in thy life-long quest,
Overworn with toiling vain,
How ill thy troubled musings fit
The holy quiet of a breast

With the Dove of Peace at rest,
Sweetly brooding over it.

Thoughts are thine which have no part
With the meek and pure of heart,
Undisturbed by outward things,
Resting in the heavenly shade,
By the overspreading wings

Of the Blessed Spirit made.
Thoughts of strife and hate and wrong
Sweep thy heated brain along,
Fading hopes for whose success

It were sin to breathe a prayer ;-
Schemes which Heaven may never bless,-
Fears which darken to despair.
Hoary priest! thy dream is done
Of a hundred red tribes won

To the pale of Holy Church;
And the heretic o'erthrown,
And his name no longer known,
And thy weary brethren turning,
Joyful from their years of mourning,
"Twixt the altar and the porch.
Hark! what sudden sound is heard
In the wood and in the sky,
Shriller than the scream of bird,-
Than the trumpet's clang more high !
Every wolf-cave of the hills,-

Forest arch and mountain gorge,
Rock and dell, and river verge,-
With an answering echo thrills.
Well does the Jesuit know that cry,
Which summons the Norridgewock to die,
And tells that the foe of his flock is nigh.
He listens, and hears the rangers come,
With loud hurrah, and jar of drum,
And hurrying feet (for the chase is hot),
And the short, sharp sound of rifle shot,
And taunt and menace,-answered well
By the Indians' mocking cry and yell,-
The bark of dogs,-the squaw's mad scream,-