the good may be moved at his
destitute and unhappy state; to set forth his wants and his claims, that
ignorance may no longer be pleaded as an excuse for withholding, from
the original proprietor of the soil, the compensation or atonement which
is demanded at once by justice, honor, and humanity.

Authentic pictures of Indian life have another and a different value, in
a literary point of view. In the history and character of the aborigines
is enveloped all the distinct and characteristic poetic material to
which we, as Americans, have an unquestioned right. Here is a peculiar
race, of most unfathomable origin, possessed of the qualities which have
always prompted poetry, and living lives which are to us as shadowy as
those of the Ossianic heroes; our own, and passing away--while we take
no pains to arrest their fleeting traits or to record their picturesque
traditions. Yet we love poetry; are ambitious of a literature of our
own, and sink back dejected when we are convicted of imitation. Why is
it that we lack interest in things at home? Sismondi has a passage to
this effect:--

"The literature of other countries has been frequently adopted by a
young nation with a sort of fanatical admiration. The genius of those
countries having been so often placed before it as the perfect model of
all greatness and all beauty, every spontaneous movement has been
repressed, in order to make room for the most servile imitation; and
every national attempt to develop an original character has been
sacrificed to the reproduction of something conformable to the model
which has been always before its eyes."

This is certainly true of us, since we not only adopt the English view
of everything, but confine ourselves to the very subjects and imagery
which have become consecrated to us by love and habit. Not to enter into
the general subject of our disposition to parrotism, our neglect of
Indian material in particular may be in part accounted for, by our
having become acquainted with the aborigines after the most unpoetical
fashion, in trying to cheat them out of their lands, or shooting them
when they declined being cheated; they, in their turn, driven to the
resource of the weak and the ignorant, counterplotting us, and taking,
by means of blood and fire, what we would not give them in fair
compensation. This has made our business relations very unpleasant;
and everybody knows that when this becomes the case, it is hard for
parties to d