God sent his messenger of faith, And whispered in the maiden's heart, "Rise up, and look from where thou art, And scatter with unselfish hands Thy freshness on the barren sands And solitudes of death." O beauty of holiness, Of self-forgetfulness,- of lowliness! Whose very gentleness and weakness Of the sealed volume that I bear, The deed divine Is written in characters of gold, That never shall grow old, O God! it is thy indulgence That fills the world with the bliss Of a good deed like this! The Angel of Evil Deeds (with open book). Not yet, not yet Is the red sun wholly set, But evermore recedes, While open still I bear The Book of Evil Deeds, To let the breathings of the upper air Visit its pages and erase The records from its face! Fainter and fainter as I gaze In the broad blaze The glimmering landscape shines, And below me the black river Is hidden by wreaths of vapour! Fainter and fainter the black lines Begin to quiver Along the whitening surface of the paper! Shade after shade The terrible words grow faint and fade, And in their place Runs a white space. Down goes the sun! But the soul of one, Who by repentance Has escaped the dreadful sentence, With closed Book To God do I ascend. Lo! over the mountain steeps A blackness inwardly brightening As a storm-cloud lurid with lightning. And a cry of lamentation, Repeated and again repeated, As the reverberation Of cloud answering unto cloud, Swells and rolls away in the distance, As it the sheeted Lightning retreated, Baffled and thwarted by the wind's resistance It is Lucifer, The son of mystery; And since God suffers him to be, He, too, is God's minister, And labours for some good By us not understood! THE SONG OF HIAWATHA, INTRODUCTION. SHOULD you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, With the odours of the forest, With the dew and damp of meadows, I should answer, I should tell you, "From the forests and the prairies, From the great lakes of the Northland, From the land of the Dacotahs, From the mountains, moors, and fenlands, Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, Feeds among the reeds and rushes. I repeat them as I heard them. From the lips of Nawadaha, Should you ask where Nawadaha In the lodges of the beaver, In the hoof-prints of the bison, In the eyrie of the eagle! "All the wild-fowl sang them to him, In the moorlands and the fenlands, In the melancholy marshes ; Mahng, the loon, the wild goose, Wawa, "And the pleasant water-courses, "There he sung of Hiawatha. Ye who love the haunts of Nature, And the rushing of great rivers Through their palisades of pine-trees, And the thunder in the mountains, Whose innumerable echoes Flap like eagles in their eyries ;- Listen to these wild traditions, To this Song of Hiawatha ! Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple. Every human heart is human, There are longings, yearnings, strivings Touch God's right hand in that darkness To this Song of Hiawatha! Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles Of the Here and the Hereafter :-- B |