perhaps to find an excuse for his
weakness in the faces of his attendants. But every eye was suffused
with the sweetly contagious softness. The generous savage no longer
hesitated. The compassion of the rude state is neither ostentatious nor
dilating: nor does it insult its object by the exaction of impossible
conditions. Powhatan lifted his grateful and delighted daughter, and the
captive, scarcely yet assured of safety, from the earth...."

"The character of this interesting woman, as it stands in the concurrent
accounts of all our historians, is not, it is with confidence affirmed,
surpassed by any in the whole range of history; and for those qualities
more especially which do honor to our nature--an humane and feeling
heart, an ardor and unshaken constancy in her attachments--she stands
almost without a rival.

"At the first appearance of the Europeans her young heart was impressed
with admiration of the persons and manners of the strangers; but it is
not during their prosperity that she displays her attachment. She is not
influenced by awe of their greatness, or fear of their resentment,
in the assistance she affords them. It was during their severest
distresses, when their most celebrated chief was a captive in their
hands, and was dragged through the country as a spectacle for the sport
and derision of their people, that she places herself between him and
destruction.

"The spectacle of Pocahontas in an attitude of entreaty, with her hair
loose, and her eyes streaming with tears, supplicating with her enraged
father for the life of Captain Smith when he was about to crush the head
of his prostrate victim with a club, is a situation equal to the genius
of Raphael. And when the royal savage directs his ferocious glance for a
moment from his victim to reprove his weeping daughter, when softened by
her distress his eye loses its fierceness, and he gives his captive to
her tears, the painter will discover a new occasion for exercising his
talents."

The painters have availed themselves of this opportunity. In one picture
Smith is represented stiffly extended on the greensward (of the woods),
his head resting on a stone, appropriately clothed in a dresscoat,
knee-breeches, and silk stockings; while Powhatan and the other savages
stand ready for murder, in full-dress parade costume; and Pocahontas, a
full-grown woman, with long, disheveled hair, in the sentimental dress
and attitude of a Letitia E. Landon of the