Page:Scenes in my Native Land.pdf/68

Of conscience, made those western wilds their home?
How to their door the prowling savage stole,
Staining their hearth-stone with the blood of babes,
And as the Arab strikes his fragile tent
Making the desert lonely, how they left
Their infant Zion with a mournful heart
To seek a safer home?
                                Fain would I sit
Beside this ruined fort and muse of them,
Mingling their features with my humble verse,
Whom many of the noblest of our land
Claim as their honored sires.
                                        On all who bear
Their name, or lineage, may their mantle rest,
That firmness for the truth, that calm content
With simple pleasures, that unswerving trust
In toil, adversity and death, which cast
Such healthful leaven mid the elements
That peopled this New World.

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When Louis Fourteenth, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantz, scattered the rich treasure of the hearts of more than half a million of subjects to foreign climes, this Western World profited by his mad prodigality. Among the wheat with which its newly broken surface was sown, none was more purely sifted than that which France thus cast away. Industry, integrity, moderated desires, piety without austerity,