The Song of Hiawatha   ::   Longfellow Henry Wadsworth

With both hands his face he covered,

Seven long days and nights he sat there,

As if in a swoon he sat there,

Speechless, motionless, unconscious

Of the daylight or the darkness.

Then they buried Minnehaha;

In the snow a grave they made her

In the forest deep and darksome

Underneath the moaning hemlocks;

Clothed her in her richest garments

Wrapped her in her robes of ermine,

Covered her with snow, like ermine;

Thus they buried Minnehaha.

And at night a fire was lighted,

On her grave four times was kindled,

For her soul upon its journey

To the Islands of the Blessed.

From his doorway Hiawatha

Saw it burning In the forest,

Lighting up the gloomy hemlocks;

From his sleepless bed uprising,

From the bed of Minnehaha,

Stood and watched it at the doorway,

That it might not be extinguished,

Might not leave her in the darkness.

"Farewell!" said he, "Minnehaha!

Farewell, O my Laughing Water!

All my heart is buried with you,

All my thoughts go onward with you!

Come not back again to labor,

Come not back again to suffer,

Where the Famine and the Fever

Wear the heart and waste the body.

Soon my task will be completed,

Soon your footsteps I shall follow

To the Islands of the Blessed,

To the Kingdom of Ponemah,

To the Land of the Hereafter!"



XXI

The White Man's Foot

In his lodge beside a river,

Close beside a frozen river,

Sat an old man, sad and lonely.

White his hair was as a snow-drift;

Dull and low his fire was burning,

And the old man shook and trembled,

Folded in his Waubewyon,

In his tattered white-skin-wrapper,

Hearing nothing but the tempest

As it roared along the forest,

Seeing nothing but the snow-storm,

As it whirled and hissed and drifted.

All the coals were white with ashes,

And the fire was slowly dying,

As a young man, walking lightly,

At the open doorway entered.