Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/44

12   And who shall deem the spot unblest, Where Nature’s younger children rest, Lulled on their sorrowing mother’s breast?

Deem ye that mother loveth less These bronzed forms of the wilderness She foldeth in her long caress?

As sweet o’er them her wild-flowers blow, As if with fairer hair and brow The blue-eyed Saxon slept below.

What though the places of their rest No priestly knee hath ever pressed,— No funeral rite nor prayer hath blessed?

What though the bigot’s ban be there, And thoughts of wailing and despair, And cursing in the place of prayer!

Yet Heaven hath angels watching round The Indian’s lowliest forest-mound,— And they have made it holy ground.

There ceases man’s frail judgment; all His powerless bolts of cursing fall Unheeded on that grassy pall.

O peeled and hunted and reviled, Sleep on, dark tenant of the wild! Great Nature owns her simple child!

And Nature’s God, to whom alone The secret of the heart is known,— The hidden language traced thereon;

Who from its many cumberings Of form and creed, and outward things, To light the naked spirit brings;

Not with our partial eye shall scan, Not with our pride and scorn shall ban, The spirit of our brother man!

To the winds give our banner!
 * Bear homeward again!”

Cried the Lord of Acadia,
 * Cried Charles of Estienne!

From the prow of his shallop
 * He gazed, as the sun,

From its bed in the ocean,
 * Streamed up the St. John.

O’er the blue western waters
 * That shallop had passed,

Where the mists of Penobscot
 * Clung damp on her mast.

St. Saviour had looked
 * On the heretic sail,

As the songs of the Huguenot
 * Rose on the gale.

The pale, ghostly fathers
 * Remembered her well,

And had cursed her while passing,
 * With taper and bell;

But the men of Monhegan,
 * Of Papists abhorred,

Had welcomed and feasted
 * The heretic Lord.

They had loaded his shallop
 * With dun-fish and ball,

With stores for his larder,
 * And steel for his wall.

Pemaquid, from her bastions
 * And turrets of stone,

Had welcomed his coming
 * With banner and gun.

And the prayers of the elders
 * Had followed his way,

As homeward he glided,
 * Down Pentecost Bay.

Oh, well sped La Tour!
 * For, in peril and pain,

His lady kept watch,
 * For his coming again.

O’er the Isle of the Pheasant
 * The morning sun shone,

On the plane-trees which shaded
 * The shores of St. John.