Like rime-covered moss hung his beard,
flowing down from his face to his girdle;
And wan was his aspect and weird,
and often he chanted and mumbled
In a strange and mysterious tongue,
as he bent o'er his book in devotion,
Or lifted his dim eyes and sung,
in a low voice, the solemn "_Te Deum_,"
Or Latin, or Hebrew, or Greek--
all the same were his words to the warriors,--
All the same to the maids and the meek,
wide-wondering-eyed, hazel-brown children.
Father Rene Menard [L]--it was he,
long lost to his Jesuit brothers,
Sent forth by an holy decree
to carry the Cross to the heathen.
In his old age abandoned to die,
in the swamps, by his timid companions,
He prayed to the Virgin on high,
and she led him forth from the forest;
For angels she sent him as men--
in the forms of the tawny Dakotas,
And they led his feet from the fen,
from the slough of despond and the desert,
Half dead in a dismal morass,
as they followed the red-deer they found him,
In the midst of the mire and the grass,
and mumbling "_Te Deum laudamus.
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