est, and the solitude. This river, this mountain, this measureless
meadow speak to him in a language of their own. Dwelling with them, he
learns their varied tongues, and his speech becomes the echo of the
beauty that lies spread around him. Every name for lake or river, for
mountain or meadow, has its peculiar significance, and to tell the Indian
title of such things is generally to tell the nature of them also. Ossian
never spoke with the voice of the mist-shrouded mountain or the wave-beat
shores of the isles more thoroughly than does this chief of the Blackfeet
or the Sioux speak the voices of the things of earth and air amidst which
his wild life is cast.

I know that it is the fashion to hold in derision and mockery the idea
that nobility, poetry, or eloquence exist in the wild Indian. I know that
with that low brutality which has ever made the Anglo-Saxon race deny its
enemy the possession of one atom of generous sensibility, that dull
enmity which prompted us to paint the Maid of Orleans a harlot, and to
call Napoleon the Corsican robber--I know that that same instinct glories
in degrading the savage, whose chief crime is that he prefers death to
slavery; glories in painting him devoid of every trait of manhood, worthy
only to share the fate of the wild beast of the wilderness--to be shot
down mercilessly when seen. But those bright spirits who have redeemed
the America of to-day from the dreary waste of vulgar greed and ignorant
conceit which we in Europe have flung so heavily upon her; those men
whose writings have come back across the Atlantic, and have become as
household words among us--Irving, Cooper, Longfellow--have they not found
in the rich store of Indian poetry the source of their choicest thought?
Nay, I will go farther, because it may be said that the a poet would be
prone to drape with poetry every subject on which his fancy lighted, as
the sun turns to gold and crimson the dullest and the dreariest clouds:
but Search the books of travel amongst remote Indian tribes, from
Columbus to Catlin, from Charlevoix to Carver, from Bonneville to
Pallisser the story is ever the same. The traveller is welcomed and made
much of; he is free to come and go; the best food is set before him; the
lodge is made warm and bright; he is welcome to stay his lifetime if he
pleases. "I swear to your majesties," writes Columbus--alas! the red
man's greatest enemy--"I swear to your majesties that there is not in the
world a