Shaded by China trees, in the midst of luxuriant gardens,

Stood the houses of planters, with Negro cabins and dovecotes.

They were approaching the region where reigns perpetual summer,

Where through the Golden Coast, the groves of orange and citron,

Sweeps with majestic curve the river away to the eastward.

They, too, swerved from their course, and entering the Bayou of Plaquemine,

Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters,

Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction.

Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress

Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in midair

Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals.

Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken, save by the herons

Home to their roosts in the cedar trees returning at sunset,

Or by the owl, as he greeted the moon with demoniac laughter.

Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water,

Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches,

Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin.

Dreamlike, and indistinct, and strange were all things around them,

And o'er their spirits there came a feeling of wonder and sadness,

Strange forebodings of ill, unseen and that cannot be encompassed.

As, at the tramp for a horse's hoof on the turf of the prairie,

Far in advance are closed the leaves of the shrinking mimosa,

So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil,

Shrinks and closes the heart ere the stroke of doom has attained it.

But Evangeline's heart was sustained by a vision, that faintly

Floated before her eyes, and beckoned her on through the moonlight.

It was the thought of her brain that assumed the shape of a phantom.

Through those shadowy aisles had Gabriel wandered before her,