I.

Many a weary year had passed since the burning of Grand-Pré,

When on the falling tide the freighted vessels departed,

Bearing a nation, with all its household gods, into exile,

Exile without an end, and without an example in story.

Far asunder, on separate coasts, the Acadians landed;

Scattered were they, like flakes of snow when the wind

from the northeast

Strikes aslant through the fogs that darken the Banks of Newfoundland.

Friendless, homeless, hopeless, they wandered from city to city,

From the cold lakes of the North to sultry Southern savannas--

From the bleak shores of the sea to the lands where the Father of Waters

Seizes the hills in his hands, and drags them down to the ocean,

Deep in their sands to bury the scattered bones of the mammoth.

Friends they sought and homes; and many, despairing, heartbroken,

Asked of the earth but a grave, and no longer a friend nor a fireside.

Written their history stands on tablets of stone in the churchyards.

Long among them was seen a maiden who waited and wandered,

Lowly and meek in spirit, and patiently suffering all things.

Fair was she and young; but, alas! before her extended,

Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway

Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered

before her,

Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned,

As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is marked by

Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine.

Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished;

As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,

Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended