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circled the highest peaks. It seemed as if the day was ushered in with a grandeur commensurate with the importance of time to the sons of men. For some moments I stood enrapted, unable to disengage myself. At length I strolled on, but stopped frequently to look about me, till by degrees I began to take a stronger interest in what lay directly in my path. The utmost order and regularity prevailed in every thing within my observation, as if all was under some one controlling influence. What most astonished me was, that those who were going forth to their labors, and whose work had already commenced, did not carry in their countenances the expression of an ordinary laborer, who goes about his task with a kind of dogged indifference. On the contrary, one would have supposed that those I beheld were engaged in some pleasant sport or pastime, so cheerfully and so happily did they seem to set their hands to it.

This produced in me a lightness of heart which I never before felt; for in these cheerful husbandmen I seemed to witness an exposition of the True Life. For I saw no one toiling. I beheld none tasked; although every body was full of industry-delightful, animating industry. A new light beamed on me; for suddenly, labor and dull submission, or what is worse, weariness, were separated, and the work-man stood forth with joyous energy to pursue his avocations.

There was here an abrupt angle in the road, made to avoid some immense rocks, which had in their time found their way from the mountain down into the valley, and which obstructed the view directly before me. Passing this bend, I came unexpectedly on Josephine Fluellen and Mademoiselle Annette, who were returning from their morning's excursion to the house. They were in a fine flow of spirits, as I judged from the first glance. Annette held her light hat in her hand; the ribbon which secured her hair had parted from its fastening, and the rich dark curls fell luxuriantly over her neck, while her face shone with animation- that timid, sensitive creature, whom I saw shrinking behind her friend at the cottage! Josephine was also in a pleasant mood; her hat, although still on her head, was thrown so far back as to be kept on by the strings only, and appeared 'most charmingly négligé. Both ladies stopped short on seeing me: I stood still and bowed, but said nothing. 'Herr Saint Leger is up betimes, I see,' said Josephine. enjoy the morning view so much as you anticipated?'

I cannot describe how much more than

'Do you

'Here you are at last; I have found you!' exclaimed the familiar voice of Macklorne, who at that moment came round the angle of the road. 'How happens it, Saint Leger, that you succeeded in tracing the route of these heroines so unerringly? I thought I had quite half an hour the start of you.'

I took admiration for a guide, and lo! it led me to a stand just here,' replied I, gaily, glancing first at Annette and then at Josephine.

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Well, if you are really so doubtful, let me assist your decision, by relieving you of the main difficulty;' and he took the hand of Annette. 'Herr Saint Leger can now say with truth,' said Josephine, that necessity knows no law!' The next moment I was again by her side, walking slowly toward the mansion of her father.

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COURTSHIP

AND

MARRIAGE.

FROM THE SWEDISH OF TEGNER.

BISHOP TEGNER is one of the most popular of all the modern poets of Sweden. Translations from his writings by our accomplished scholar-bard, LONGFELLOW, have made his name widely known in America.

ED. KNICKERBOCKER.

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They kissed and caressed, as all fond lovers must,

Gazing each on the other's fair brow;

They swore by the stars, by the moon pledged their trust,
E'en as those who are courting do now.

III.

The nightingale sung in the tall palm-tree's top,
While sighed the soft wind ere 't would pass;
And the red roses ran on the green hill-side up,
Where the turtle-doves cooed in the grass.

IV.

No neighbors they had, and the day dragged so slow
That they gazed, when night came, with a sigh,
On the rich mellow fruit that hung tempting them so,
Till they plucked - —so had you done, or I.

V.

'Tis a scandal, a shame!' the consistory bawled:
Shall he take fallen EvE for his own?'

So to better the matter, was suddenly called
An angel, with mitre and gown.

VI.

Oh! then came the bans, and a wedding off-hand

Smoothly done up was all in a trice:

It was o'er- but the angel with bright flaming brand
Drove them out of their loved Paradise!

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O'er the deserts of wedlock, with hearts growing cold,
Toiled they on in the midst of life's bother;

One kiss sent they back to their Eden of old,
But they never again kissed each other.

VIII.

Affianced young maiden! accepted young swain!
To the bride-couch press on, if ye will;
But your Eden of courtship ne'er turn to again,
For the angel stands guarding it still.

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HISTORY OF THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC, and the War of the North-American Tribes against the English Colonies after the conquest of Canada. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, JR. Boston: LITTLE AND BROWN.

THOSE of our readers who followed in these pages the author of the present work in his Oregon Trail' will not need to be informed that he writes with great spirit and simplicity, and that he possesses the rare faculty of making the reader see with his own eyes; mentally, we mean, for physically, we are sorry to say, his own are none of the best. But let us indicate what our author sets forth in his programme, and establishes in its fulfilment. The conquest of Canada, it is premised, was an event of momentous consequence in American history. It changed the political aspect of the continent, prepared a way for the independence of the British colonies, rescued the vast tracts of the interior from the rule of military despotism, and gave them eventually to the keeping of an ordered democracy. Yet to the red natives of the soil its results were wholly disastrous. Could the French have maintained their ground, the ruin of the Indian tribes might long have been postponed; but the victory of Quebec was the signal of their swift decline. Thenceforth they were destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward, unchecked and unopposed. They saw the danger, and led by a great and daring champion, struggled fiercely to avert it. The history of that epoch, crowded as it is with scenes of tragic interest, with marvels of suffering and vicissitude, of heroism and endurance, has been, as yet, unwritten, buried in the archives of governments, or among the obscurer records of private adventure. To rescue it from oblivion was the object of the work before us. It portrays the American forest and the American Indian at the period when both received their final doom. Habits of early reading had greatly aided the writer in preparing for his task; but necessary knowledge of a more practical kind was supplied by the indulgence of a strong natural taste, which led him, at various intervals, to the wild regions of the north and west. Here, by the camp-fire or in the canoe, he gained familiar acquaintance with the men and scenery of the wilderness. In 1846 he visited various primitive tribes of the Rocky Mountains, and was for a time domesticated in a village of the western Dahcotah, on the high plains between Mount Laramie and the range of the Medicine Bow. The most troublesome part of the task, he tells us, was the collection of the necessary documents. These consisted of letters, journals, reports, and despatches, scattered among numerous public offices and private families, in Europe and America. When brought together, they amounted to about three thousand four hundred manuscript pages. Contemporary newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets were also examined, and careful search made for every

book which, directly or indirectly, might throw light upon the subject. He visited the sites of all the principal events recorded in his narrative, and gathered such local traditions as were worthy of confidence. He expresses his indebtedness to the liberality of Hon. LEWIS CASS for a curions collection of papers relating to the siege of Detroit by the Indians. Other important contributions were obtained from the State Paper Offices of London and Paris, from the archives of this state, Pennsylvania, and other states, and from the manuscript collections of several historical societies. He was permitted to copy from the extensive collection of Indian documents of the late WILLIAM L. STONE such portions as would serve the purposes of his history. To numerous other high sources, native and foreign, our author acknowledges his obligations for contributions of authentic and very valuable matériel. The promiscuous mass of matter thus collected, we are not surprised to learn, presented an aspect by no means inviting: The field of the history was uncultured and unreclaimed, and the labor that awaited me was like that of the border settler, who, before he builds his rugged dwelling, must fell the forest-trees, burn the under-growth, clear the ground, and hew the fallen trunks to due proportion.' And in accomplishing this labor, the writer encountered obstacles of no ordinary nature; one of which was the condition of his eye-sight, which was seriously, yet let us hope not permanently, impaired. For about three years, he informs us, the light of day was insupportable, and every attempt at reading or writing was completely debarred. Under these circumstances, the task of sifting the materials and composing the work was begun and finished. The papers were repeatedly read aloud by an amanuensis, copious notes and extracts were made, and the narrative written down from his dictation. This process, though extremely slow and laborious, was not without its advantages. His authorities were even more minutely examined, more scrupulously collated, and more thoroughly digested, than they would have been under ordinary circumstances. We present but a single extract, which, although somewhat longer than it is our custom to give in this department, will not be found too long for the instruction and entertainment of our readers. It is a graphic and well-discriminated consideration of the Indian character:

'Or the Indian character, much has been written foolishly, and credulously believed. By the rhapsodies of poets, the cant of sentimentalists, and the extravagance of some who should have known better, a counterfeit image has been tricked out, which might seek in vain for its likeness through every corner of the habitable earth; an image bearing no more resemblance to its original than the monarch of the tragedy and the hero of the epic poem bear to their living prototypes in the palace and the camp. The shadows of his wilderness home, and the darker manle of his own inscrutable reserve, have made the Indian warrior a wonder and a mystery. Yet to the eye of rational observation there is nothing unintelligible in him. He is full, it is true, of contradiction. He deems himself the centre of greatness and renown; his pride is proof against the fiercest torments of fire and steel; and yet the same man would beg for a drám of whiskey, or pick up a crust of bread thrown to him like a dog, from the tent-door of the trayeller. At one moment, he is wary and cautious to the verge of cowardice; at the next, he abandons himself to a very insanity of recklessness, and the habitual self-restraint which throws an impenetrable veil over emotion is joined to the wild, impetuous passions of a beast or a madman.

Such inconsistencies, strange as they seem in our eyes, when viewed under a novel aspect, are but the ordinary incidents of humanity. The qualities of the mind are not uniform in their action through all the relations of life. With different inen, and different races of men, pride, valor, prudence, have different forms of manifestation, and where in one instance they lie dormaut, in anothe they ar keenly awake. The conjunction of greatness and littleness, meanness and pride, is older than the days of the patriarchs; and such antiquated phenomena, displayed under a new form in the unreflecting, undisciplined mind of a savage, call for no special wonder, but should rather be classed with the other enigmas of the fathomless human heart. The dissecting-knife of a ROCHEFOUCAULT might lay bare matters of no less curious observation in the breast of every man.

Nature has stamped the Indian with a hard and stern physiognomy. Ambition, revenge, envy, jealousy, are his ruling passions; and his cold temperament is little exposed to those effeminate vices which are the bane of milder races. With him revenge is an overpowering instinct; nay, more, it is a point of honor and a duty. His pride sets all language at defiance. He loathes the thought of coercion; and none of his race have ever stooped to discharge a menial office. A wild love of liberty, an utter intolerance of control, lie at the basis of his char

acter, and fire his whole existence. Yet, in spite of this haughty love of independence, he is a devout hero-worshipper; and high achievement in war or policy touches a chord to which his nature never fails to respond. He looks up with admiring reverence to the sages and heroes of his tribe; and it is this principle, joined to the respect for age, which springs from the patriarchal element in his social system, which, beyond all others, contributes union and harmony to the erratic members of an Indian community. With him the love of glory kindles into a burning passion; and to allay its cravings, he will dare cold and famine, fire and tempest, torture, and death itself.

These generous traits are overcast by much that is dark, cold, and sinister, by sleepless distrust, and rankling jealousy. Treacherous himself, he is always suspicious of treachery in others. Brave as he is- and few of mankind are braver - he will vent his passion by a secret stab rather than an open blow. His warfare is full of ambuscade and stratagem; and he never rushes into battle with that joyous self-abandonment with which the warriors of the Gothic races flung themselves into the ranks of their enemies. In his feasts and his drinking-bouts we find none of that robust and full-toned mirth which reigned at the rude carousals of our barbaric ancestry. He is never jovial in his cups, and maudlin sorrow or maniacal rage are the sole result of his potations.

Over all emotion he throws the veil of an iron self-control, originating in a peculiar form of pride, and fostered by rigorous discipline from childhood upward. He is trained to conceal passion, and not to subdue it. The inscrutable warrior is aptly imaged by the hackneyed figure of a volcano covered with snow; and no man can say when or where the wild-fire will burst forth. This shallow self-mastery serves to give dignity to public deliberation, and harmony to social life. Wrangling and quarrel are strangers to an Indian dwelling; and while an assembly of the ancient Gauls was garrulous as a convocation of magpies, a Roman senate might have taken a lesson from the grave solemnity of an Indian council. In the midst of his family and friends, he hides affections, by nature none of the most tender, under a mask of icy coldness; and in the torturing fires of his enemy, the haughty sufferer maintains to the last his look of grim defiance.

His intellect is as peculiar as his moral organization. Among all savages, the powers of perception preponderate over those of reason and analysis; but this is more especially the case with the Indian. An acute judge of character, at least of such parts of it as his experience enables him to comprehend; keen to a proverb in all exercises of war and the chase, he seldom traces effects to their causes, or follows out actions to their remote results. Though a close observer of external nature, he no sooner attempts to account for her phenomena than he involves himself in the most ridiculous absurdities; and quite content with these puerilities, he has not the least desire to push his inquiries farther. His curiosity, abundantly active within its own narrow circle, is dead to all things else; and to attempt rousing it from its torpor is but a bootless task. He seldom takes cognizance of general or abstract ideas; and his language has scarcely the power to express them, except through the medium of figures drawn from the external world, and often highly picturesque and forcible. The absence of reflection makes him grossly improvident, and unfits him for pursuing any complicated scheme of war or policy.

"Some races of men seem moulded in wax, soft and melting, at once plastic and feeble. Some races, like some metals, combine the greatest flexibility with the greatest strength; but the Indian is hewn out of a rock. You cannot change the form without destruction of the substance. Races of inferior energy have possessed a power of expansion and assimilation to which he is a stranger; and it is this fixed and rigid quality which has proved his ruin. He will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together. The stern, unchanging features of his mind excite our admiration, from their very immutability; and we look with deep interest on the fate of this irreclaimable son of the wilderness, the child who will not be weaned from the breast of his rugged mother. And our interest increases when we discern in the unhappy wanderer, mingled among his vices, the germs of heroic virtues; a hand bountiful to bestow, as it is rapacious to seize, and, even in extremest famine, imparting its last morsel to a fellow-sufferer; a heart which, strong in friendship as in hate, thinks it not too much to lay down life for its chosen comrade; a soul true to its own idea of honor, and burning with an unquenchable thirst for greatness and renown.

The imprisoned lion in the showman's cage differs not more widely from the lord of the desert, than the beggarly frequenter of frontier garrisons and dram-shops differs from the proud denizen of the woods. It is in his native wilds alone that the Indian must be seen and studied. Thus to depict him is the aim of the ensuing History; and if, from the shades of rock and forest, the savage features should look too grimly forth, it is because the clouds of a tempestuous war have cast upon the picture their murky shadows and lurid fires.'

Such a history is worth a hundred novels, or 'nouvelettes,' in illustrating the true character of the Indian race. Since the great genius of COOPER created his matchless illustrations of the red man, he has been imitated and followed by minor intellects, north and south, until an ‘Indian hero' has almost become a ‘scoffing and a by-word' in the hands of struggling aspirants to a literary distinction wholly beyond their reach. With the foregoing passage we take our leave of this interesting history, commending it cordially to our readers as a work not only calculated to repay but to reward perusal. Its typographical excellence, we may add in closing, is not its least attraction; but this may be predicated of all the works which proceed from the well-established house whence it is issued; a house whose members seem to appreciate the fact, that there is almost as much in the becoming dress of a book as in that of a gentleman.

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