Ruth starts erect, with bloodshot eye,

And lips drawn tight across her teeth, Showing their locked embrace beneath,

In the red fire-light:

66

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 by —
The 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 IS 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!

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,13
13
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,

19

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

The solemn bell of vespers ringing, And hallowed torch-light 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 crossed, 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, 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 there

And peers the hemlock-boughs between,
Half trembling, as he seeks to look
Upon the Jesuit's Cross and Book.1
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!
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,

no song: