What term we savage? The untutored heart Of Nature’s child is but a slumbering fire; Prompt at a breath, or passing touch to start Into quick flame, as quickly to retire;
Ready alike its pleasance to impart, Or scorch the hand which rudely wakes its ire: Demon or child, as impulse may impel, Warm in its love, but in its vengeance fell.
And these Columbian warriors to their strand Had welcomed Europe’s sons, and rued it sore:— Men with smooth tongues, but rudely armed hand; Fabling of peace, when meditating gore; Who their foul deeds to veil, ceased not to brand The Indian name on every Christian shore. What wonder, on such heads, their fury’s flame Burst, till its terrors gloomed their fairer fame?
For they were not a brutish race, unknowing Evil from good; their fervid souls embraced With virtue’s proudest homage, to o’erflowing, The mind’s inviolate majesty. The past To them was not a darkness; but was glowing With splendour which all time had not o’ercast; Streaming unbroken from creation’s birth, When God communed and walked with men on earth.
Stupid idolatry had never dimmed The Almighty image in their lucid thought. To Him alone their zealous praise was hymned; And hoar Tradition from her treasury brought Glimpses of far-off times, in which were limned, His awful glory;—and their prophets taught Precepts sublime,—a solemn ritual given, In clouds and thunder, to their sires from heaven.[63]
And in the boundless solitude which fills, Even as a mighty heart, their wild domains; In caves and glens of the unpeopled hills; And the deep shadow that for ever reigns Spirit-like, in their woods; where, roaring, spills The giant cataract to the astounded plains,— Nature, in her sublimest moods, had given Not man’s weak lore,—but a quick flash from heaven.
Roaming in their free lives, by lake and stream; Beneath the splendour of their gorgeous sky; Encamping, while shot down night’s starry gleam, In piny glades, where their forefathers lie; Voices would come, and breathing whispers seem To rouse within, the life which may not die; Begetting valorous deeds, and thoughts intense, And a wild gush of burning eloquence.
Such appeared to me ten years ago, when writing these stanzas, the character of the North American Indians; such it appears to me now. What an eternal disgrace to both British and Americans if this race of “mighty hunters before the Lord” shall, at the very moment when they shew themselves ready to lay down the bow and throw all the energies of their high temperament into civilized life, still be repelled and driven into the waste, or to annihilation. Their names and deeds and peculiar character are already become part of the literature of America; they will hereafter present to the imagination of posterity, one of the most singular and interesting features of history. Their government, the only known government of pure intellect; their grave councils; their singular eloquence; their stern fortitude; their wild figures in the war-dance; their “fleet foot” in the ancient forest; and all those customs, and quick keen thoughts which belong to them, and them alone, will for ever come before the poetic mind of every civilized people. Shall they remain, to look back to the days in which the very strength of their intellects and feelings made them repel the form of civilization, while they triumph in the universal diffusion of knowledge and Christian hope? or shall it continue to be said,