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"And the youthful and the brave
With their beauty and renown,
To the hollow chambers of the wave
In darkness have gone down.

"They are vanished from their place;

Let their homes and hearths make moan! But the rolling waters keep no trace

Of pang or conflict gone."

Alas! thou haughty deep!

The strong, the sounding far!
My heart before thee dies:-I weep
To think on what we are.

To think that so we pass,

High hope, and thought, and mind, Even as the breath-stain from the glass, Leaving no sign behind.

Saw'st thou naught else, thou main?
Thou and the midnight sky?
Naught save the struggle, brief and vain,
The parting agony?

And the sea's voice replied,

"Here nobler things have been;

Power with the valiant, when they died,

To sanctify the scene:

Courage, in fragile form,

Faith, trusting to the last,

Prayer, breathing heavenward through the storm, But all alike have passed."

Sound on, thou haughty sea!

These have not passed in vain :

My soul awakes, my hope springs free
On victor wings again.

Thou, from thine empire driven,

Mayst vanish with thy powers;

But, by the hearts that here have striven,
A loftier doom is ours.

MRS. HEMANS.

LESSON CXVII.

THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN.

THERE is, in the fate of the unfortunate Indians, much to awaken our sympathy, and much to disturb the sobriety of our judgment; much which may be urged to excuse their own atrocities; much in their characters which betrays us into an involuntary admiration. What can be more melancholy than their history? By a law of their nature they seem destined to a slow, but sure extinction. Everywhere, at the approach of the white man, they fade away. We hear the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone forever. They pass mournfully by us, and they re

turn no more.

Two centuries ago, the smoke of their wigwams, and the fires of their councils, rose in every valley, from Hudson's Bay to the farthest Florida, from the ocean to the Mississippi and the lakes. The shouts of victory, and the war-dance, rung through the mountains and the glades. The thick arrows, and the deadly tomahawk, whistled through the forests; and the hunter's trace, and the dark encampment, startled the wild beasts in their lairs. The warriors stood forth in their glory. The young listened to the songs of other days. The mothers played with their infants, and gazed on the scene with warm hopes of the future. Braver men never lived; truer men never drew the bow. They had courage, and fortitude, and sagacity, and perseverance, beyond most of the human race. shrunk from no dangers, and they feared no hardships.

They

If they had the vices of savage life, they had the virtues also. They were true to their country, their friends, and their homes. If they forgave not injury, neither did they forget kindness. If their vengeance was terrible, their fidelity and generosity were unconquerable also. Their love, like their hate, stopped not on this side of the grave. But where are they? Where are the villages, and warriors, and youth? the sachems and the tribes? the hunters and their families? They have perished. They are consumed. The wasting pestilence has not alone done the mighty work. No; nor famine, nor war. There has been a mightier power, a moral canker, which hath eaten into their heart-cores; a plague, which the touch of the white

man communicated; a poison, which betrayed them into a lingering ruin.

The winds of the Atlantic fan not a single region which they may now call their own. Already the last feeble remnants of the race are preparing for their journey beyond the Mississippi. I see them leave their miserable homes, the aged, the helpless, the women, and the warriors, "few and faint, yet fearless still." The ashes are cold on their native hearths. The smoke no longer curls around their lowly cabins. They move on with a slow, unsteady step. The white man is upon their heels, for terror or dispatch; but they heed him not. They turn to take a last look of their deserted villages. They cast a last glance upon the graves of their fathers. They shed no tears; they utter no cries; they heave no groans.

There is something in their hearts which passes speech. There is something in their looks, not of vengeance nor submission, but of hard necessity, which stifles both; which chokes all utterance; which has no aim nor method. It is courage absorbed in despair. They linger but for a moment. Their look is onward. They have passed the fatal stream. It shall never be repassed by them; no, never.

Yet there lies not be

They know, and feel,

tween us and them an impassable gulf. that there is for them still one remove further, not distant, nor unseen. It is to the general burial-ground of their race.

Reason as we may, it is impossible not to read, in such a fate, much that we know not how to interpret; much of provocation to cruel deeds and deep resentments; much of apology for wrong and perfidy; much of pity mingling with indignation; much of doubt and misgiving as to the past; much of painful recollection; much of dark foreboding. Philosophy may tell us, that conquest, in other cases, has adopted the conquered into its own bosom; and thus, at no distant period, given them the common privileges of subjects; but that the red men are incapable of such an assimilation. By their very nature and character, they can neither unite themselves with civil institutions, nor with safety be allowed to remain as distinct communities.

Policy may suggest that their ferocious passions, their independent spirit, and their wandering life, disdain the restraints. of society; that they will submit to superior force only while

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