📔 The Song of Hiawatha

And he wooed her with his soft caresses, / Wooed her with his smile of sunshine, […]

From his lodge went Hiawatha, / Dressed for travel, armed for hunting; / Dressed in deer-skin shirt and leggings, / Richly wrought with quills and wampum; / On his head his eagle-feathers, / Round his waist his belt of wampum, […]

Buried was the bloody hatchet, / Buried was the dreadful war-club, / Buried were all warlike weapons, / And the war-cry was forgotten.

[Gitche Manito] Breathed upon the neighbouring forest, / Made its great boughs chafe together, / Till in flame they burst and kindled; […]

And the rabbit from his path-way / Leaped aside, and at a distance / Sat erect upon his haunches.

Far below him plashed the waters, / Plashed and washed the dreamy waters; […]

Thus the Birch Canoe was builded / In the valley, by the river, / In the bosom of the forest; / And the forest’s life was in it, / All its mystery and its magic, / All the lightness of the birch-tree, / All the toughness of the cedar, / All the larch’s supple sinews;

I have given you roe and reindeer, / I have given you brant and beaver, / Filled the marshes full of wild-fowl, / Filled the rivers full of fishes; / Why then are you not contented? / Why then will you hunt each other?

Ah! the singing, fatal arrow, / Like a wasp it buzzed, and stung him [a roebuck]!