The hermit priest, who lingers now
On the Bald Mountain's shrubless brow,
The grey and thunder-smitten pile
Which marks afar the Desert Isle,*

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 hill-sides wreathing,
The soft airs midst their clusters breathing,
The wings which dipped, the stars which shone
Within thy bosom, blue Garronne !

And round the Abbey's shadowed wall,

At morning spring and even-fall,

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 exstatic 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 hill-side slopes adown,

*Mt. Desert Island, the Bald Mountain upon which overlooks Frenchman's and Penobscot Bay. It was upon this island that the Jesuits made their earliest settlement.

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 never more
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

a moment lost.

Touched by the pencil of the frost, And, with the motion of each breeze, A moment seen 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

and there

Pere 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 peers the hemlock boughs between,
Half trembling, as he seeks to look
Upon the Jesuit's Cross and Book. *

There, gloomily against the sky

The Dark Isles rear their summits high;
And Desert Rock, abrupt and bare,

Lifts its grey turrets in the air

Seen from afar, like some strong hold
Built by the ocean kings of old;

And, faint as smoke-wreath white and thin,
Swells in the north vast Katadin :
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, Kennebeck !
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!

Father Hennepin, a missionary among the Iroquois, mentions that the Indians believed him to be a conjuror, and that they were particularly afraid of a bright silver chalice which he had in his possession. "The Indians," says Pere Jerome Lallamant, "fear us as the greatest sorcerers on earth."

Unreaped, upon the planting lands,
The scant, neglected harvest stands :

No shout is there no dance

The aspect of the very child

no song:

Scowls with a meaning sad and wild

Of bitterness and wrong.
The almost infant Norridgewock
Essays to lift the tomahawk;
And plucks his fathers knife away,
To mimic, in his frightful play,

The scalping of an English foe:
Wreaths on his lip a horrid smile,
Burns, like a snake's, his small eye, while

Some bough or sapling meets his blow.

The fisher, as he drops his line,

Starts, when he sees the hazles quiver
Along the margin of the river,

Looks up and down the ripling tide,
And grasps the firelock at his side.

For Bomazeen* from Tacconock

Has sent his runners to Norridgewock,

With tidings that Moulton and Harmon of York

Far up the river have come :

[wood,

They have left their boats - they have entered the

And filled the depths of the solitude

With the sound of the ranger's drum.

On the brow of a hill, which slopes to meet
The flowing river, and bathe its feet.
The bare-washed rock, and the drooping grass,
And the creeping vine, as the waters pass-
A rude and unshapely chapel stands,
Built up in that wild by unskilled hands;
Yet the traveller knows it a place of prayer,
For the holy sign of the cross is there :

*Bomazeen is spoken of by Penhallow, as "the famous warrior and chieftain of Norridgewock." He was killed in the attack of the English upon Norridgewock, in 1724.

And should he chance at that place to be,

Of a sabbath morn, or some hallowed day,
When prayers are made and masses are said,
Some for the living and some for the dead,
Well might that traveller start to see

The tall dark forms, that take their way
From the birch canoe, on the river-shore,
And the forest paths, to that chapel door;
And marvel to mark the naked knees

And the dusky foreheads bending there,
While, in coarse white vesture, over these
In blessing or in prayer,

Stretching abroad his thin pale hands,

Like a shrouded ghost, the Jesuit stands.

*Pere Ralle, or Rasles, was one of the most zealous and indefatigable of that band of Jesuit missionaries who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, penetrated the forests of America, with the avowed object of converting the heathen. The first religious mission of the Jesnits, to the savages in North America, was in 1611. The zeal of the fathers for the conversion of the Indians to the Catholic faith, knew no bounds. For this, they plunged into the depths of the wilderness; habituated themselves to all the hardships and privations of the natives; suffered cold, hunger, and some of them death itself, by the extremest tortures. Pere Brebeuf, after laboring in the cause of his mission for twenty years, together with his companion, Pere Lallamant, was burned alive. To these might be added the names of those Jesuits who were put to death by the Iroquois - Daniel, Garnier, Buteaux, La Riborerde, Goupil, Constantin, and Liegeouis. "For bed," says Father Lallamant, in his Relation de ce qui s'est dans le pays des Hurons, 1640, c. 3, "we have nothing but a miserable piece of bark of a tree; for nourishment, a handful or two of corn, either roasted or soaked in water, which seldom satisfies our hunger; and after all, not venturing to perform even the ceremonies of our religion, without being considered as sorcerers." Their success among the natives, however, by no means equalled their exertions. Pere Lallamant says-"With respect to adult persons, in good health, there is little apparent success; on the contrary, there have been nothing but storms and whirlwinds from that quarter."

Sebastien Ralle established himself, sometime about the year 1670, at Norridgewock, where he continued more than forty years. He was accused, and perhaps not without justice, of exciting his praying Indians against the English, whom he looked upon as the enemies not only of his king, but also of the Catholic religion. He was killed by the English, in 1724, at the foot of the cross, which his own hands had planted. This Indian church was broken up, and its members either killed outright or dispersed.