A Highly Cultivated
Man, - All Whose Bones Can Be Bent!
Whose heaven-born virtues are
but good manners!
The young pines springing up in the cornfields
from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of
civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods,
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society
with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our
saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius,
dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light
of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and
short-lived blaze of candles. The Society-Islanders had their
day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be "of equal
antiquity with the _atua fauau po_, or night-born gods." It is
true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and it is
sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and
gather the fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not
fail to dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths. It
will have its garden-plots and its _parterres_ elsewhere than on
the earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its
subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as berries.
We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the
horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the
buffalo.
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