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4. In fact, the Indians that I have had an opportunity of seeing in real life are quite different from those described in poetry. They are by no means the stoics that they are represented; taciturn, unbending, without a tear or a smile. Taci turn they are, it is true, when in company with white men. whose good will they distrust, and whose language they do not understand; but the white man is equally taciturn under like circumstances. When the Indians are among themselves, however, there cannot be greater gossips. Half their time is taken up in talking over their adventures in war and hunting, and in telling whimsical stories.

5. They are great mimics and buffoons, also, and entertain hemselves excessively at the expense of the whites with whom they have associated, and who have supposed them impressed with profound respect for their grandeur and dignity. They are curious observers, noting everything in silence, but with a keen and watchful eye; occasionally exchanging a glance or a grunt with each other, when anything particularly strikes them, but reserving all comments until they are alone. Then it is that they give full scope to criticism, satire, mimicry, and mirth.

6. In the course of my journey along the frontier, I have had repeated opportunities of noticing their excitability and boisterous merriment at their games; and have occasionally noticed a group of Osages sitting round a fire until a late hour of the night, engaged in the most animated conversation, and at times making the woods resound with peals of laughter. As to tears, they have them in abundance, both real and affected; at times they make a merit of them. No one weeps more bitterly or profusely at the death of a relative or friend; and they have stated times when they repair to howl and lament at their graves. As far as I can judge, the Indian of poetical fiction is like the shepherd of pastoral romance, a mere personification of imaginary attributes.

IRVING

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That pierced their bosoms; and each man would turn,
And gaze in wonder on his neighbor's face,

That with the like dumb wonder answered him :

Then some would weep, some shout, some, deeper touched,
Keep down the cry with motion of their hands,

In fear but to have lost a syllable.

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The evening came, yet there the people stood,
As if 't were noon, and they the marble sea,
Sleeping without a wave. You could have heard
The beating of your pulses while he spoke.

2. SOLILOQUY OF VAN ARTEVElde.

Henry Taylor

Say that I fall not in this enterprise,
Still must my life be full of hazardous turns,
And they that house with me must ever live
In imminent peril of some evil fate. -
Make fast the doors; heap wood upon the fire;
Draw in your stools, and pass the goblet round.
And be the prattling voice of children heard.
Now let us make good cheer

But what is this!

Do I not see, or do I dream I see,
A form that midmost in the circle sits
Half visible, his face deformed with scars,
And foul with blood?
-O! yes,'
-I know it - there
Sits Danger with his feet upon the hearth!

The dweller in the mountains, on whose ear
The accustomed cataract thunders unobserved,
The seaman, who sleeps sound upon the deck,
Nor hears the loud lamenting of the blast,
Nor heeds the weltering of the plangent wave,-
These have not lived more undisturbed than I.
But build not upon this; the swollen stream
May shake the cottage of the mountaineer,

dignity or effect!

8. My Lords, this ruinous and ignominious situation, where we cannot act with success nor suffer with honor, calls upon us to remonstrate in the strongest and loudest language of truth, to rescue the ear of Majesty from the delusions which surround it. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America. What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. You may swell every expense, and strain every effort, still more extravagantly; accumulate every assistance you can beg or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country: your efforts are forever vain and impotent, doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and of plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American. as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms! never! never! never!

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CLXXXI.

LITERATURE OF THE ANCIENT HEBREWS.

1. In no respect does the Hebrew nation appear to greater advantage than when viewed in the light of their sublime compositions. Nor is this remark confined simply to the style or mechanism of their writings, which is nevertheless allowed by the best judges to possess many merits; it may be extended more especially to the exalted nature of their subjects, the works, the attributes, and the purposes of Jehovah. The poets of pagan antiquity, on the other hand, excite by their descriptions of divine things our ridicule or disgust.

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2. Even the most approved of their order exhibit repulsive images of their deities, and suggest the grossest ideas in connec tion with the principles and enjoyments which prevail among the inhabitants of Olympus. But the contemporaries of David, inferior in many things to the ingenious people who listened to the strains of Homer and of Virgil, are remarkable for their elevated conceptions of the Supreme Being as the Creator and Governor of the world, not less than for the suitable terms in which they give utterance to their exalted thoughts.

3. In no other country but Judea, at that early period, were such sentiments as the following either expressed or felt: "0 Jehovah, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, thou that hast set thy glory above the heavens! When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Bless Jehovah, O my soul! O Lord, my God, thou art very great, and art clothed with honor and majesty! Thou coverest thyself with light as with a garment, and stretchest out the heavens like a curtain who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, who maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind!

4. "Bless Jehovah, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless Jehovah, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits; who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies. Jehovah is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, neither rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust."

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5. "O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me thou

knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my bed and about my path, and art acquainted with all my ways. Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I go down to the dwelling of the departed, thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be turned into day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light arc both alike to thee."

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6. A similar train of lofty conception pervades the writings of the prophets. Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out the heavens with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance; he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, who bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding.

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7. But it is not only in such sublimity of language and exalted imagery that the literature of the Hebrews surpasses the writings of the most learned and ingenious portion of the heathen world. A distinction not less remarkable is to be found in the humane and compassionate spirit which animates even the earliest parts of the sacred volume, composed at a time when the manners of all nations were still unrefined, and the softer emotions were not held in honor. "Blessed is he who considereth the poor and needy; the Lord will deliver him in the time of trouble. The Lord will preserve him and keep him alive; he shall be blessed upon earth, and thou wilt not deliver him into the will of his enemies. The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing; thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness."

8. We shall in vain seek for instances of such a benign and liberal feeling in the volumes of the most enlightened of pagan writers, whether poets or orators. How beautifully does the following observation made by Solomon contrast with the contempt expressed by Horace for the great body of his countrymen : He

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human conscience resold, philosophy proscribed, prejudices encouraged, the human mind diminished, instruction materialized and concentrated in the pure sciences alone, schools converted into barracks, literature degraded by censorship or humbled by baseness, national representation perverted, election abolished, the arts enslaved, commerce destroyed, credit annihilated, navigation suppressed, international hatred revived, the people op pressed, or enrolled in the army, paying, in blood or taxes, the ambition of an unequalled soldier, but covering with the great name of France the contradictions of the age, the miseries and degradations of the country.

5. This is the founder! This is the man!

--

EI

a man, instead of a revolution!- a man, instead of an epoch! - a man, instead of a country! a man, instead of a nation! Nothing after him! nothing around him but his shadow, making sterile the eighteenth century, absorbed and concen'trated in himself alone. Personal glory will be always spoken of as characterizing the age of Napoleon; but it will never merit the praise bestowed upon that of Augustus, of Charlemagne, and of Louis the Fourteenth, There is no age; there is only a name; and this name signifies nothing to humanity, but himself. False in institutions, for he retrograded; false in policy, for he debased; false in morals, for he corrupted; false in civilization, for he oppressed, he was only true in war; for he shed torrents of human blood. But what can we, then, allow him? His individual genius was great, but it was the genius of materialism. His intelligence was vast and clear; but it was the intelligence of calculation. He counted, he weighed, he measured; but he felt not, he loved not, he sympathized with none; he was a statue rather than a man.

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6. His metallic nature was felt even in his style. Much superior to Cæsar in the account of his campaigns, his style is not the written expression alone, - it is the action. Every sentence in his pages is, so to speak, the counterpart and counter-impres sion of the fact. There is neither a letter, a sound, nor a color, wasted between the fact and the word, and the word is himself. His phrases, concise, but struck off without ornament, recall those times when Baj'azet and Charlemagne, not knowing how to write their names at the bottom of their imperial acts, dipped their hands in ink or blood, and applied them with all their joints impressed upon the parchment. It was not the signature; it was the hand itself of the hero, thus fixed eternally before the eyes; and such were the pages of his campaigns, dictated by Napoleon, the very soul of movement, of action, and of combat. 7. This fame, which constituted his morality, his conscience, and his principle, he merited, by his nature and his talents, from

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