AN INDIAN MEMOIR.
As moal bronze unged his look:
A soul that pity touchd, but never shook;
Traind from his tree-rockd cradle to his bier,
The ?erce extremes of good and ill to brook
Impassive--fearing but the shame of fear--
stoic of the woods--a man without a tear.
CAMPBELL.
IT is to be regretted that those early writers who treated of the discovery alement of America have not given us more particular and did ats of the remarkable characters that ?ourished in savage life. The sty aes which have reached us are full of peculiarity and i; they furnish us with nearer glimpses of human nature, and show what man is in a paratively primitive state and what he owes to civilization.
There is something of the charm of discovery in lighting upon these wild and unexplored tracts of human nature--in witnessing, as it were, the native growth of moral se, and perceiving those generous and romantic qualities which have been arti?cially cultivated by society vegetating in spontaneous hardihood and rude magni?ce.
In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existenan depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is stantly ag a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native character are re?ned away or softened down by the levelling in?uence of what is termed good-breeding, and he practises so may deceptions and affects so many generous ses for the purposes of popularity that it is dif?cult to distinguish his real from his arti?cial character.
The Indian, on the trary, free from the restraints and re?s of polished life, and in a great degree a solitary and indepe being, obeys the impulses of his ination or the dictates of his judgment; and thus the attributes of his nature, being freely indulged, grow singly great and striking.
Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface; he, however, who would study Nature in its wildness and variety must pluo the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.
These re?es arose on casually looking through a volume of early ial history wherein are recorded, with great bitterness, the es of the Indians and their wars with the settlers New England. It is painful to perceive, even from these partial narratives, how the footsteps of civilization may be traced in the blood of the abines; how easily the ists were moved to hostility by the lust of quest; how merciless aerminating was their warfare. The imagination shrinks at the idea of how many intellectual beings were hunted from the earth, how many brave and noble hearts, of Natures sterling age, were broken down and trampled in the dust.
Such was the fate of PHILIP OF POKA, an Indian warrior whose name was oerror throughout Massachusetts and ecticut.
He was the most distinguished of a number of porary sachems whned over the Pequods, the Narragas, the anoags, and the other eastern tribes at the time of the ?rst settlement of New England--a band of native untaught heroes who made the most generous struggle of which human nature is capable, ?ghting to the last gasp in the cause of their try, without a hope of victory or a thought of renown. Worthy of an age of poetry and ?t subjects for local story and romantic ?, they have left scarcely any authentic traces on the page of history, but stalk like gigantic