•

Beneath the westward turning eye

A thousand wooded islands lie,—

Gems of waters ! — with each hue

Of brightness set in ocean's blue.
Each, bears aloft its tuft of trees

Touched by the pencil of the frost,



r



3 1 6 WIIITTIEK'S POEMS.
And, with the motion of each breeze,
A moment seen, — a moment lost, —
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 gray turrets in the air,
Seen from afar, like some strange 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



WSITTIEF^S rOEMS.
3^7



And mingle with his own bright bay.
Slow sweep hio dark and gathering floods,
Arched over by (.he ancient woods,
Which Time, in those dim solitudes,

Wielding the dull axe of Decay,

Alone hath ever shorn away.
