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(From Evangeline)
ONWARD o’er sunken sands, through a wilderness sombre with forests, | |
| Day after day they glided adown the turbulent river; | |
| Night after night, by their blazing fires, encamped on its borders. | |
| Now through rushing chutes, among green islands, where plumelike | |
| Cotton-trees nodded their shadowy crests, they swept with the current, | 5 |
| Then emerged into broad lagoons, where silvery sand-bars | |
| Lay in the stream, and along the wimpling waves of their margin, | |
| Shining with snow-white plumes, large flocks of pelicans waded. | |
| Level the landscape grew, and along the shores of the river, | |
| Shaded by china-trees, in the midst of luxuriant gardens, | 10 |
| Stood the houses of planters, with negro-cabins and dove-cots. | |
| They were approaching the region where reigns perpetual summer, | |
| Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron, | |
| Sweeps with majestic curve the river away to the eastward. | |
| They, too, swerved from their course; and, entering the Bayou of Plaquemine, | 15 |
| Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters. | |
| Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. | |
| Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress | |
| Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in mid-air | |
| Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals. | 20 |
| Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken, save by the herons | |
| Home to their roosts in the cedar-trees returning at sunset, | |
| Or by the owl, as he greeted the moon with demoniac laughter. | |
| Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water, | |
| Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches, | 25 |
| Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. * * * * * | |
| Then in his place, at the prow of the boat, rose one of the oarsmen, | |
| And, as a signal sound, if others like them peradventure | |
| Sailed on those gloomy and midnight streams, blew a blast on his bugle. | |
| Wide through the dark colonnades and corridors leafy the blast rang, | 30 |
| Breaking the seal of silence, and giving tongues to the forest. | |
| Soundless above them the banners of moss just stirred to the music. | |
| Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance, | |
| Over the watery floor, and beneath the reverberant branches; | |
| But not a voice replied; no answer came from the darkness; | 35 |
| And, when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence. | |
| Then Evangeline slept; but the boatmen rowed through the midnight, | |
| Silent at times, then singing familiar Canadian boat-songs, | |
| Such as they sang of old on their own Acadian rivers, | |
| While through the night were heard the mysterious sounds of the desert, | 40 |
| Far off,—indistinct,—as of wave or wind in the forest, | |
| Mixed with the whoop of the crane and the roar of the grim alligator. | |
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