With soft effulgence!

O God! it is thy indulgence

That fills the world with the bliss

Of a good deed like this!

THE ANGEL OF EVIL DEEDS, with open book.

Not yet, not yet

Is the red sun whclly set,
But evermore recedes,
While open still I bear
The Book of Evil Deeds,
To let the breathings of the
Visit its pages and erase
The records from its face!
Fainter and fainter as I gaze
In the broad blaze

upper air

The glimmering landscape shines,
And below me the black river
Is hidden by wreaths of vapor!
Fainter and fainter the black lines
Begin to quiver

Along the whitening surface of the paper;
Shade after shade

The terrible words grow faint and fade,

And in their place

Runs a white space!

Down goes the sun

But the soul of one,

Who by repentance

Has escaped the dreadful sentence,

Shines bright below me as I look.

It is the end!

With closed Book

To God do I ascend.

Lo! over the mountain steeps
A dark, gigantic shadow sweeps
Beneath my feet;

A blackness inwardly brightening

With sullen heat,

As a storm-cloud lurid with lightning.
And a cry of lamentation,
Repeated and again repeated,
Deep and loud

As the reverberation

Of cloud answering unto cloud,

Swells and rolls away in the distance,
As if the sheeted

Lightning retreated,

Baffled and thwarted by the wind's resistance.

It is Lucifer,

The son of mystery;

And since God suffers him to be,

He, too, is God's minister,

And labors for some good

By us not understood!

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA.

1855.

SHOULD you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest,

With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations,
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,

From the land of the Dacotahs,

From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands,

Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,

Feeds among the reeds and rushes.

I repeat them as I heard them

From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."

Should you ask where Nawadaha
Found these songs, so wild and wayward,
Found these legends and traditions,
I should answer, I should tell you,
"In the bird's-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver,
In the hoof-prints of the bison,
In the eyry of the eagle!

All the wild-fowl sang them to him, In the moorlands and the fen-lands,