THE LAKE OF THE DISMAL SWAMP.
While Thomas Moore held a minor appointment in Bermuda, early in the last century, he visited the United States, and there found material for several well-known poems. His imagination was greatly struck by what he heard of the Dismal Swamp, which at that time was a vast morass more than forty miles in length and twenty-five miles in width, extending from Virginia into North Carolina, and having in the midst of it a stagnant lake to which few had ever penetrated. Many strange stories were told of this gloomy swamp, with its dark recesses in which savage animals and loathsome serpents lurked, and where, according to the legends of the country-people, unearthly sights had at times been seen.
Moore’s genius gave to one of these legends a poetical form in the lines which are here reprinted and which were long extremely popular. It may be mentioned as a matter of interest that the Dismal Swamp has in recent years been in part reclaimed by drainage, and that a canal now crosses it, thus destroying its old-time mystery and romance.
By THOMAS MOORE.
“They made her grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
“And her firefly lamp I soon shall see,
And her paddle I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress-tree
When the footstep of death is near!”
Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds—
His path was rugged and sore,
Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds,
Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds.
And man never trod before!
And when on earth he sunk to sleep,
If slumber his eyelids knew,
He lay where the deadly vine doth weep
Its venomous tear, and nightly steep
The flesh with blistering dew!
And near him the she-wolf stirred the brake,
And the copper-snake breathed in his ear,
Till he starting cried, from his dream awake,
“O when shall I see the dusky Lake,
And the white canoe of my dear?”
He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright
Quick over its surface played—
“Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!”
And the dim shore echoed for many a night
The name of the death-cold maid!
Till he hollowed a boat of the birchen bark,
Which carried him off from the shore;
Far he followed the meteor spark,
The wind was high and the clouds were dark,
And the boat returned no more.
But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp,
This lover and maid so true
Are seen, at the hour of midnight damp,
To cross the Lake by a firefly lamp,
And paddle their white canoe!