Whittiers Complete Poems, vol 1 | Page 8

stalwart
crew;
Joy glistens in each wild blue eye,
Turned to green earth and
summer sky.
Each broad, seamed breast has cast aside
Its
cumbering vest of shaggy hide;
Bared to the sun and soft warm air,

Streams back the Norsemen's yellow hair.
I see the gleam of axe and
spear,
The sound of smitten shields I hear,
Keeping a harsh and
fitting time
To Saga's chant, and Runic rhyme;
Such lays as
Zetland's Scald has sung,
His gray and naked isles among;
Or
muttered low at midnight hour
Round Odin's mossy stone of power.

The wolf beneath the Arctic moon
Has answered to that startling
rune;
The Gael has heard its stormy swell,
The light Frank knows
its summons well;
Iona's sable-stoled Culdee
Has heard it sounding
o'er the sea,
And swept, with hoary beard and hair,
His altar's foot
in trembling prayer.
'T is past,--the 'wildering vision dies
In darkness on my dreaming
eyes
The forest vanishes in air,
Hill-slope and vale lie starkly bare;

I hear the common tread of men,
And hum of work-day life again;
The mystic relic seems alone
A broken mass of common stone;

And if it be the chiselled limb
Of Berserker or idol grim,
A
fragment of Valhalla's Thor,
The stormy Viking's god of War,
Or
Praga of the Runic lay,
Or love-awakening Siona,
I know not,--for
no graven line,
Nor Druid mark, nor Runic sign,
Is left me here, by
which to trace
Its name, or origin, or place.
Yet, for this vision of
the Past,

This glance upon its darkness cast,
My spirit bows in
gratitude
Before the Giver of all good,
Who fashioned so the human
mind,
That, from the waste of Time behind,
A simple stone, or
mound of earth,
Can summon the departed forth;
Quicken the Past
to life again,
The Present lose in what hath been,
And in their
primal freshness show
The buried forms of long ago.
As if a portion
of that Thought
By which the Eternal will is wrought,
Whose
impulse fills anew with breath
The frozen solitude of Death,
To

mortal mind were sometimes lent,
To mortal musings sometimes sent,

To whisper-even when it seems
But Memory's fantasy of dreams--

Through the mind's waste of woe and sin,
Of an immortal origin!

1841.
FUNERAL TREE OF THE SOKOKIS.
Polan, chief of the Sokokis Indians of the country between
Agamenticus and Casco Bay, was killed at Windham on Sebago Lake
in the spring of 1756. After the whites had retired, the surviving Indians
"swayed" or bent down a young tree until its roots were upturned,
placed the body of their chief beneath it, then released the tree, which,
in springing back to its old position, covered the grave. The Sokokis
were early converts to the Catholic faith. Most of them, prior to the
year 1756, had removed to the French settlements on the St. Francois.
AROUND Sebago's lonely lake
There lingers not a breeze to break

The mirror which its waters make.
The solemn pines along its shore,
The firs which hang its gray rocks
o'er,
Are painted on its glassy floor.
The sun looks o'er, with hazy eye,
The snowy mountain-tops which
lie
Piled coldly up against the sky.
Dazzling and white! save where the bleak,
Wild winds have bared
some splintering peak,
Or snow-slide left its dusky streak.
Yet green are Saco's banks below,
And belts of spruce and cedar
show,
Dark fringing round those cones of snow.
The earth hath felt the breath of spring,
Though yet on her deliverer's
wing
The lingering frosts of winter cling.
Fresh grasses fringe the meadow-brooks,
And mildly from its sunny
nooks
The blue eye of the violet looks.

And odors from the springing grass,
The sweet birch and the sassafras,

Upon the scarce-felt breezes pass.
Her tokens of renewing care
Hath Nature scattered everywhere,
In
bud and flower, and warmer air.
But in their hour of bitterness,
What reek the broken Sokokis,

Beside their slaughtered chief, of this?
The turf's red stain is yet undried,
Scarce have the death-shot echoes
died
Along Sebago's wooded side;
And silent now the hunters stand,
Grouped darkly, where a swell of
land
Slopes upward from the lake's white sand.
Fire and the axe have swept it bare,
Save one lone beech, unclosing
there
Its light leaves in the vernal air.
With grave, cold looks, all sternly mute,
They break the damp turf at
its foot,
And bare its coiled and twisted root.
They heave the stubborn trunk aside,
The firm roots from the earth
divide,--
The rent beneath yawns dark and wide.
And there the fallen chief is laid,
In tasselled garb of skins arrayed,

And girded with his wampum-braid.
The silver cross he loved is pressed
Beneath the heavy arms, which
rest
Upon his scarred and naked breast.
'T is done: the roots are backward sent,
The beechen-tree stands up
unbent,
The Indian's fitting monument!
When of that sleeper's broken race
Their green and pleasant
dwelling-place,
Which knew them once, retains no trace;

Oh, long may sunset's light be shed
As now upon that beech's head,

A green memorial of the dead!
There shall his fitting requiem be,
In northern winds, that, cold and
free,
Howl nightly in that funeral tree.
To their wild wail the waves which break
Forever round that lonely
lake
A solemn undertone shall make!
And who shall deem the spot unblest,
Where Nature's younger
children rest,
Lulled on their sorrowing