And was this savage? Say,
Ye ancient few,
Who struggled through
Young freedom's trial-day,
What first your sleeping wrath awoke?
On your own shores war's larum broke:
What turned to gall even kindred blood?
Round your own homes the oppressor stood:
This every warm affection chilled,
This every heart with vengeance thrilled,
And strengthened every hand;
From mound to mound,
The word went round-
"Death for our native land!"
Ye mothers, too, breathe ye no sigh,
For them who thus could dare to die?
Are all your own dark hours forgot,
Of soul-sick suffering here,
Your pangs, as from yon mountain spot,*
Death spoke in every booming shot,
That knelled upon your ear?
How oft that gloomy, glorious tale ye tell,
As round your knees your children's children hang,
Of them, the gallant ones, ye loved so well,
Who to the conflict for their country sprang!
In pride, in all the pride of wo,
Ye tell of them, the brave, laid low,
Who for their birthplace bled;
In pride, the pride of triumph then,
Ye tell of them, the matchless men,
From whom the invaders fled.
And ye, this holy place who throng,
The annual theme to hear,
And bid the exulting song
Sound their great names from year to year;
Ye, who invoke the chisel's breathing grace,
In marble majesty their forms to trace;
Ye, who the sleeping rocks would raise,
To guard their dust and speak their praise;
Ye, who, should some other band
With hostile foot defile the land,
Feel that ye, like them, would wake,
Like them the yoke of bondage break,
Nor leave a battle-blade undrawn,
Though every hill a sepulchre should yawn-
Say, have not ye one line for those,
One brother-line to spare,
Who rose but as your fathers rose,
And dared as ye would dare?
Alas! for them, their day is o'er,
Their fires are out from hill and shore:
No more for them the wild deer bounds;
The plough is on their hunting grounds;
The pale man's axe rings through their woods,
The pale man's sail skims o'er their floods,
Their pleasant springs are dry;
Their children-look! by power oppressed,
Beyond the mountains of the west,
Their children go-to die.
O doubly lost! Oblivion's shadows close
Around their triumphs and their woes.
On other realms, whose suns have set,
Reflected radiance lingers yet;
There, sage and bard have shed a light
That never shall go down in night;
There, time-crowned columns stand on high,
To tell of them who cannot die;
Even we, who then were nothing, kneel
In homage there, and join earth's general peal.
But the doomed Indian leaves behind no trace,
To save his own, or serve another race:
With his frail breath his power has passed away; His deeds, his thoughts, are buried with his clay. Nor lofty pile, nor glowing page,
Shall link him to a future age,
Or give him with the past a rank:
His heraldry is but a broken bow,
His history but a tale of wrong and wo,
His very name must be a blank.
Cold, with the beast he slew, he sleeps;
O'er him no filial spirit weeps;
No crowds throng round, no anthem-notes ascend,
To bless his coming and embalm his end;
Even that he lived, is for his conqueror's tongue,-
By foes alone his death-song must be sung;
No chronicles but theirs shall tell
His mournful doom to future times;
May these upon his virtues dwell,
And in his fate forget his crimes.
Concluding Lines of the "Fall of the Indian."-MCLELLAN.
YET sometimes, in the gay and noisy street
Of the great city, which usurps the place
Of the small Indian village, one shall see
Some miserable relic of that race,
Whose sorely-tarnished fortunes we have sung;-
Yet how debased and fallen! In his eye
The flame of noble daring is gone out,
And his brave face has lost its martial look.
His eye rests on the earth, as if the grave
Were his sole hope, his last and only home.
A poor, thin garb is wrapped about his frame,
Whose sorry plight but mocks his ancient state,
And in the bleak and pitiless storm he walks
With melancholy brow, and shivers as he goes.
His pride is dead; his courage is no more;
His name is but a by-word. All the tribes,
Who called this mighty continent their own,
Are homeless, friendless wanderers on earth!
Death-Song of Outalissi.-CAMPBELL.
"AND I could weep," the Oneida chief
His descant wildly thus begun,—
"But that I may not stain with grief
The death-song of my father's son,
Or bow this head in wo;
For, by my wrongs and by my wrath,
To-morrow, Areouski's breath,
That fires yon heaven with storms of death,
Shall light us to the foe:
And we shall share, my Christian boy,
The foeman's blood, the avenger's joy!
"But thee, my flower, whose breath was given
By milder genii o'er the deep,
The spirits of the white man's heaven
Forbid not thee to weep:
Nor will the Christian host,
Nor will thy father's spirit grieve
To see thee, on the battle's eve,
Lamenting, take a mournful leave
Of her who loved thee most:
She was the rainbow to thy sight,
Thy sun-thy heaven-of lost delight.
"To-morrow, let us do or die!
But when the bolt of death is hurled, Ah! whither then with thee to fly? Shall Outalissi roam the world?
Seek we thy once-loved home?
The hand is gone that cropped its flowers:
Unheard the clock repeats its hours;
Cold is the hearth within those bowers;
And should we thither roam,
Its echoes, and its empty tread,
Would sound like voices from the dead.
"Or shall we cross yon mountains blue,
Whose streams my kindred nation quaffed,
And by my side, in battle true,
A thousand warriors drew the shaft?
Ah! there, in desolation cold,
The desert serpent dwells alone,
Where grass o'ergrows each mouldering bone,
And stones themselves, to ruin grown,
Like me are death-like old.
Then seek we not their camp; for there
The silence dwells of my despair.
"But hark! the trump!-to-morrow, thou
In glory's fires shalt dry thy tears:
Even from the land of shadows now
My father's awful ghost appears,
Amidst the clouds that round us roll:
He bids my soul for battle thirst,—
He bids me dry the last, the first,
The only tears, that ever burst
From Outalissi's soul;
Because I may not stain with grief
The death-song of an Indian chief."
Portrait of a worldly-minded Woman.-FREEMAN.
A WOMAN has spent her youth without the practice of any remarkable virtue, or the commission of any thing which is flagrantly wrong; and she is now united with a man, whose moral endowments are not more distinguished than her own; but who is industrious, rich and prosperous. Against the connexion she had no objection; and it is what her friends entirely approved. His standing in life is respectable; and they both pass along without scandal, but without much approbation of their own consciences, and without any loud applause from others; for the love of the world is the
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