Evangeline | Page 9

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that lay in the roadstead.?Columns of shining smoke uprose, and flashes of flame were?Thrust through their folds and withdrawn, like the quivering hands of a martyr.?Then as the wind seized the gleeds and the burning thatch, and, uplifting,?Whirled them aloft through the air, at once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, unfinished;?As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,?Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended?Into the east