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.[1]
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.
