Evangeline: a Tale of Acadie

It was the month of May. Far down the Beautiful River, / Past the Ohio shore and past the mouth of the Wabash, / Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi, / Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen. / It was a band of exiles: a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked / Nation, scattered along the coast, now floating together, / Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune; / Men and women and children, who, guided by hope or by hearsay, / Sought for their kith and their kin among the few-acred farmers / On the Acadian coast, and the prairies of fair Opelousas. / With them Evangeline went, and her guide, the Father Felician. / 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, / 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, / 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, / 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. / Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken, save by the herons / Home to their roasts 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, / Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. / Dreamlike, and indistinct, and strange were all things around them; / And o'er their spirits there came a feeling of wonder and sadness, -- / Strange forebodings of ill, unseen and that cannot be compassed. / As, at the tramp of a horse's hoof on the turf of the prairies, / Far in advance are closed the leaves of the shrinking mimosa, / So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil, / Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it. / But Evangeline's heart was sustained by a vision, that faintly / Floated before her eyes, and beckoned her on through the moonlight. / It was the thought of her brain that assumed the shape of a phantom. / Through those shadowy aisles had Gabriel wandered before her, / And every stroke of the oar now brought him nearer and nearer.

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. / Wild through the dark colonnades and corridors leafy the blast rang, / 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; / 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, / 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.