The fearful stranger youth was there,

And clasped in his embrace
The pale and passing sorrowful

Gazed wildly in his face.
Like one who had been wakened from

The silent burial-place.
374 WHITTIER'S POEMS.
A shudder ran along the crowd,
And a holy man knelt there,

On the wet sea-sand, and offered up
A faint and trembling prayer,

That God would shield his people from
The spirits of the air!

And lo ! the vision passed away —
The spectre ship— the crew —

The. stranger and his pallid bride,
Departed from their view ;

And nought was left upon the waves
Beneath the arching blue.
It passed away, that vision strange.
Forever from their sight.
Yet long shall Naumkeag's annals tell

The story of that night — •
The phantom bark— the ghostly Crew—

The pale, encircling light.
THE SPECTRE WARRIORS.
"Away to your arms! for the foemen aie

here,
The yell of the red man is loud on the earl
Oh — on to the garrison — ^soldiers away,
The moccasin's track shall be bloody to-day.".
The fortress is reached, they have taken their
stand.
With war-knife in girdle, and rifle in hand ; —

Their wives are behind them, the savage be-
fore —

Will the Puritan fail at his hearth-stone and
door ?

There's a yell in the forest, unearthly and

dread.
Like the shriek of a fiend o'er the place of the

dead;
Again — how it swells through the forest afar —
Have the tribes of the fallen uprisen to war?



276 WHITTIER'S POEMS.
