to hear, if we could but borrow the souls of his tribe, while they listen to his visions.

It is a general trait with the Indian tribes to recognise the Great Spirit in every little child. They rarely refuse a child anything. When their revenge is most implacable, a little one is often sent to them, adorned with flowers and shells, and taught to lisp a prayer that the culprit may be forgiven; and such mediation is rarely without effect, even on the sternest warrior. This trait alone is sufficient to establish their relationship with Herder, Richter, and other spirits of angel-stature. Nay, if we could look back a few centuries, we should find the ancestors of Shakspeare, and the fastidiously-refined Goethe, with painted cheeks, wolves'-teeth for jewels, and boars'hides for garments. Perhaps the universe could not have passed before the vision of those star-like spirits except through the forest life of such wild ancestry.

Some theorists say that the human brain, in its formation, changes with a steady rise, through a likeness to one animal, and then another, till it is perfected in that of man, the highest animal.' It seems to be so with the nations, in their progressive rise out of barbarism. I was never before so much struck with the animalism of Indian character, as I was in the frightful war-dance of these chiefs. Their gestures were as furious as wild-cats, they howled like wolves, screamed like prairie dogs, and tramped like buffaloes. Their faces were painted fiery red, or with cross-bars of green and red, and they were decorated with all sorts of uncouth trappings of hair, and bones, and teeth. That which regulated their movements, in lieu of music, was a discordant clash; and altogether they looked and acted more like demons from the pit, than anything I ever imagined. It was the natural and appropriate language of War. The wolfish howl, and the wild-cat leap, represent it more truly than graceful evolutions and the Marseilles hymn. That music rises above mere brute vengeance;

it breathes in fervid ecstacy the soul's aspiration after freedom-the struggle of will with fate. It is the Future setting sail from old landings, and merrily piping all hands on board. It is too noble a voice to belong to physical warfare: the shrill howl of old Nan-Nouce-Fush-E-To is good enough for such brutish work it clove the brain like a tomahawk, and was hot with hatred.

In truth, that war-dance was terrific both to eye and ear. I looked at the door, to see if escape were easy, in case they really worked themselves up to the scalping point. For the first time, I fully conceived the sacrifices and perils of the Puritan settlers. Heaven have mercy on the mother who heard those dreadful yells, when they really foreboded murder! or who suddenly met such a group of grotesque demons in the loneliness of the forest!

But instantly I felt that I was wronging them in my thought. Through paint and feathers, I saw gleams of right honest and friendly expression; and I said, we are children of the same Father, seeking the same home. If the Puritans suffered from their savage hatred, it was because they met them with savage weapons, and a savage spirit. Then I thought of William Penn's treaty with the Indians; the only one ever formed without an oath, and the only one that was never broken.' I thought of the deputation of Indians, who some years ago visited Philadelphia, and knelt with ones pontaneous impulse around the monument of Penn.

Again I looked at the yelling savages in their grim array, stamping through the war-dance with a furious energy, that made the floor shake as by an earthquake; and I said, These too would bow, like little children, before the persuasive power of Christian love! Alas, if we had but faith in this divine principle, what mountains of evil might be removed into the depths of the sea!

P.S. Alas, poor Do-Hum-Me is dead! so is NoSee, Black Hawk's niece; and several of the chiefs are indisposed. Sleeping by hot anthracite fires, and then exposed to the keen encounters of the wintry wind; one hour, half stifled in the close atmosphere of theatres and crowded saloons, and the next driving through snowy streets and the midnight air; this is a process which kills civilized people by inches, but savages at a few strokes.

Do-Hum-Me was but nineteen years old, in vigorous health, when I saw her a few days since, and obviously so happy in her newly wedded love, that it ran over at her expressive eyes, and mantled her handsome face like a veil of sunshine. Now she rests among the trees, in Greenwood Cemetery; not the trees that whispered to her childhood. Her coffin was decorated according to Indian custom, and deposited with the ceremonies peculiar to her people. Alas, for the handsome one, how lonely she sleeps here! Far, far away from him, to whom her eye turned constantly as the sunflower to the light!

Sick, and sad at heart, this noble band of warriors, with melancholy steps, left the pestilential city last week, for their own broad prairies in the West. DoHum-Me was the pride and idol of them all. The old Iowa chief, the head of the deputation, was her father; and notwithstanding the stoicism of Indian character, it is said that both he and the bereaved young husband were overwhelmed with an agony of grief. They obviously loved each other most strongly. May the Great Spirit grant them a happy meeting in their 'fair hunting grounds' beyond the sky.

LETTER XXXVII.

March, 1843

When I began to write these letters, it was simply as a safety valve for an expanding spirit, pent up like steam in a boiler. I told you they would be of every fashion, according to my changing mood; now a mere panorama of passing scenes, then child-like prattle about birds or mosses; now a serious exposition of facts, for the reformer's use, and then the poet's path, on winged Pegasus, far up into the blue.

To-day I know not what I shall write; but I think I shall be off to the sky; for my spirit is in that mood when smiling faces peep through chinks in the clouds, and angel-fingers beckon and point upward. As I grow older, these glimpses into the spiritual become more and more clear, and all the visible stamps itself on my soul, a daguerreotype image of the invisible, written with sunbeams.

I sometimes ask myself, Will it continue to be so? For coming age casts its shadow before; and the rarest of attainments is to grow old happily and gracefully. When I look around among the old people of my acquaintance, I am frightened to see how large a proportion are a burden to themselves, and an annoyance to others. The joyfulness of youth excites in them no kindlier feeling than gloom, and lucky is it, if it does not encounter angry rebuke or supercilious contempt. The happiness of lovers has a still worse effect; it frets them until they become like the man with a toothache, whose irritation impelled him to kick poor puss, because she was sleeping so comfortably in the sunshine.

If this state were an inevitable attendant upon advanced years, then indeed would long life be an unmitigated curse. But there is no such necessity imposed upon us. We make old age cheerless and

morose, in the same way that we pervert all things; and that is, by selfishness. We allow ourselves to think more of our own convenience and comfort, in little matters, than we do of the happiness and improvement of others; and thus we lose the habit of sympathizing with love and joy. I pray God to enable me to guard against this. May I be ever willing to promote the innocent pleasure of others, in their own way, even if it be not my way. Selfishness can blight even the abundant blossoms of youth; and if carried into age, it leaves the soul like a horse enclosed within an arid and stony field, with plenty of verdant pastures all around him. Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kind, sunshiny old age.

'How I love the mellow sage,

Smiling through the veil of age!
And whene'er this man of years
In the dance of joy appears,

Age is on his temples hung,

But his heart-his heart is young!'

Here is the great secret of a bright and green old age. When Tithonus asked for an eternal life in the body, and found, to his sorrow, that immortal youth was not included in the bargain, it surely was because he forgot to ask the perpetual gift of loving and sympathizing.

Next to this, is an intense affection for nature, and for all simple things. A human heart can never grow old, if it takes a lively interest in the pairing of birds, the re-production of flowers, and the changing tints of autumn-ferns. Nature, unlike other friends, has an exhaustless meaning, which one sees and hears more distinctly, the more they are enamoured of her. Blessed are they who hear it; for through tones comes the most inward perceptions of the spirit. Into the ear of the soul, which reverently listens, Nature whispers, speaks, or warbles, most heavenly

arcana.