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.*

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.

See Adair's History of the American Indians.

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,

The vast, the ebbless, the engulphing tide

Of the white population still rolls on!

And quailed has their romantic heart of pride,—
The kingly spirit of the woods is gone.

Farther and farther do they wend to hide

Their wasting strength; to mourn their glory flown;
And sigh to think how soon shall crowds pursue
Down the lone stream where glides the still canoe.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE ENGLISH IN SOUTH AFRICA.

HAVING now quitted North America, let us sail southward. There we may direct our course east or west, we may pass Cape Horn, or the Cape of Good Hope, and enter the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, secure that on whatever shore we may touch, whether on continent or island, we shall find the Europeans oppressing the natives on their own soil, or having exterminated them, occupying their place. We shall find our own countrymen more than all others widely diffused and actively employed in the work of expulsion, moral corruption, and destruction of the aboriginal tribes. We talk of the atrocities of the Spaniards, of the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro, as though they were things of an ancient date, things gone by, things of the dark old days; and seem never for a moment to suspect that these dark old days were not a whit more

shocking than our own, or that our countrymen, protestant Englishmen of 1838, can be compared for a moment to the Red-Cross Knights of Mexican and Peruvian butcheries. If they cannot be compared, I blush to say that it is because our infamy and crimes are even more wholesale and inhuman than theirs. Do the good people of England, who "sit at home at ease," who build so many churches and chapels, and flock to them in such numbers,-who spend about 170,000l. annually on Bibles, and more than half a million annually in missions and other modes of civilizing and christianizing the heathen, and therefore naturally flatter themselves that they are rapidly bringing all the world to the true faith; do they or can they know that at this very moment, wherever their Bibles go, and wherever their missionaries are labouring, their own government and their own countrymen are as industriously labouring also, to scatter the most awful corruption of morals and principles amongst the simple natives of all, to us, new countries? that they are introducing diseases more pestilent than the plague, more loathsome than the charnel-house itself, and more deadly than the simoom of the tropical deserts, that levels all before it? Do they know, that even where their missionaries, like the prophets of old, have gone before the armies of God, putting the terrors of heathenism to flight, making a safe path through the heart of the most dreadful deserts; dividing the very waters, and levelling the old mountains of separation and of difficulty

By Faith supported and by Freedom led,

A fruitful field amid the desert making,

And dwell secure where kings and priests were quaking,
And taught the waste to yield them wine and bread.-Pringle.

Do they know, that when these holy and victorious men have thus conquered all the difficulties they calculated upon, and seen, by God's blessing, the savage reclaimed, the idolater convinced, the wilderness turned into a garden, and arts, commerce, and refined life rising around them, a more terrible enemy has appeared in the shape of European, and chiefly English corruption? That out of that England-whence they had carried such beneficent gifts, such magnificent powers of good-have come pouring swarms of lawless vagabonds worse than the Spaniards, and worse than the Buccaneers of old, and have threatened all their works with destruction? Do they know that in South Africa, where Smidt, Vanderkemp, Philip, Read, Kay and others, have done such wonders, and raised the Hottentot, once pronounced the lowest of the human species, and the Caffre, not long since styled the most savage, into the most faithful Christians and most respectable men; and in those beautiful islands that Ellis and Williams have described in such paradisiacal colours, that roving crews of white men are carrying everywhere the most horrible demoralization, that every shape of European crime is by them exhibited to the astonished people-murder, debauchery, the most lawless violence in person and property; and that the liquid fire which, from many a gin-shop in our own great towns, burns out the industry, the providence, the moral sense, and the life of thousands of our own people, is there poured abroad by these monsters with the same fatal effect? Whoever does not know this, is ignorant of one of the most fearful and gigantic evils which beset the course of human improvement, and render abortive a vast amount of the