savage, who should display any remarkably poetical feeling or tone of thought, would be quite as great a prodigy. Poetry flourishes most luxuriantly midway between the two extremes. Its essence is the contemplation of great passions and actions—of love, revenge, ambition. Imagination is then vivified by the means of expression or articulation; and, in the half-civilized state, neither a refined public sentiment, nor the other extreme of barbarous isolation, restrains the exhibition of great (and poetical) emotions.

The best of Hazlitt's numerous definitions of poetry, determines it to be “the excess of imagination, beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.”[8] But the Indian was destitute of all imagination; apparently, the composition of his nature included no such element; and, certainly, the rude exigencies of his life did not admit its action. Even the purity of his mythology, compared to that of the Greeks and Romans,[9] has been (by Lord Lindsay) attributed to this want—though, if such were its only effects, it might very well be supplied.

The Indian has no humor, no romance—how could he possess poetical feeling? The gratification of sensual wants is the end of his life—too often, literally the end! “He considers everything beneath his notice, which is not necessary to his advantage or enjoyment.”[10] To him a jest is as unmeaning as the babbling of a brook; his wife is a beast of burden; and even his courting is carried on by gifts of good things to eat, sent to the parents.[11] Heaven is merely a hunting-ground; his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, vices, or sentiments.[12] His idea of the Great Spirit, and the word which expresses it, may be applied with equal propriety to a formidable (though not beneficent) animal; indeed, the Indian words which we translate “spirit,” mean only superior power, without the qualification of good or evil. He has not even the ordinary inhabitive instinct of the human race; his attachment to any region of country depends upon its capacity to furnish game, and the fading of the former keeps pace with the disappearance of the latter. “Attachment to the graves of his fathers,” is an agreeable fiction—unfortunately, only a fiction.[13] He has always been nomadic, without the pastoral habits which the word supposes: a mere wandering savage, without purpose or motive, beyond the gratification of the temporary want, whim, or passion, and void of everything deserving the name of sentiment.

An extravagant, and, I am sorry to say, groundless, notion has obtained currency, among almost all writers upon the Indian character, that he is distinguished for his eloquence. But the same authors tell us, that his language, the vehicle of the supposed eloquence, can express only material ideas.[14] Now, if we knew no more of his character than this, we should be authorized to infer (what is, indeed, true), that he possesses no standard for the distinction of good and evil, and that his imagination is bounded by the lines of his sensible experience. How any degree of eloquence can be compatible with this state of things, passes comprehension. And what reflection would conclude, a little examination will confirm. The mistake has, doubtless, grown out of a misconception of the nature of eloquence itself.[15] If eloquence were all figure—even if it were, in any considerable degree, mere figure—then the tawdriest rhetorician would be the greatest orator. But it is not so. On the contrary, the use of many words (or figures) to express an idea, denotes not command of language, but the absence of that power—just as the employment of numerous tools, to effect a physical object, indicates, not skill in the branch of physics, to which the object belongs, but rather awkwardness. Of course, much must be placed, in both cases, to the account of clumsy instruments; but the instrument of speech differs from others in this: it is fashioned by, as well as for, its use; and a rude, unpolished language is, therefore, an index, in two ways, of the want of eloquence among the people who employ it.

In this view, the figurative elocution of the Indian, so far from affording evidence of oratorical power, if it proves anything, proves the opposite. It is the barrenness of his language, and not the luxuriance of his imagination, which enforces that mode of speech.[16] Imagination is the first element of oratory, simplicity its first condition. We have seen that the Indian is wholly destitute of the former; and the stilted, meretricious, and ornate style, of even his ordinary communications, entirely excludes the latter from our conception of his character.[17]

For example: take the expressions “bury the hatchet,” for “make peace,” and “a cloudless sky,” for “prosperity”—the latter being the nearest approximation to an abstract idea observed in Indian oratory. Upon examining these, and kindred forms of speech, we shall at once perceive that they are not the result of imagination, but are suggested by material analogies. Peace, to the savage, is, at best, but a negative idea; and the state of peacefulness, abstracted from the absence of war, finds no corresponding word in his language. Even friendship only means that relation, in which friends may be of use to each other. As his dialects are all synthetic,[18] his ideas are all concrete. To say, “I love” without expressing what or whom I love, would be, so to speak, very bad Indian grammar. He can not even say “two” correctly, without applying the numeral to some object. The notion of absolute being,