mly to remember
certain duties belonging to our Christian profession, which we have
sadly neglected with regard to the sons of the forest, whom we have
driven before us just as fast as we have required or desired their
lands. A few efforts have been made, not only to bring the poetry of
their history into notice, but to do them substantial good; the public
heart, however, has never responded to the feelings of those who, from
living in contact with the Indians, have felt this interest in them. To
most Americans, the red man is, to this day, just what he was to the
first settlers of the country--a being with soul enough to be blameable
for doing wrong, but not enough to claim Christian brotherhood, or to
make it _very_ sinful to shoot him like a dog, upon the slightest
provocation or alarm. While this feeling continues, we shall not look
to him for poetry; and the only imaginative writing in which he is
likely to be generally used as material, will be kindred to that known
by the appropriate title of "Pirate Literature." Mr. Cooper and Miss
Sedgwick are, perhaps, alone among our writers in their attempts to do
the Indian justice, while making him the poetical machine in fiction.

Missionaries, however, as well as others who have lived among the
aborigines for purely benevolent purposes, have discovered in them
capabilities and docility which may put to the blush many of the whites
who despise and hate them. Not only in individual cases, but in more
extended instances, the Indian has been found susceptible of religious
and moral instruction; his heart has warmed to kindness, like any other
man's; he has been able to perceive the benefits of regular industry;
his head has proved as clear in the apprehension of the distinction
between right and wrong as that of the more highly cultivated moralist;
and he receives the fundamental truths of the gospel with an avidity,
and applies them--at least to the lives and characters of his
neighbors--with a keenness, which show him to be not far behind the rest
of mankind in sensibility and acuteness. Without referring to the
testimony of the elder missionaries, which is abundant, I remember a
most touching account, by Rev. George Duffield, jr., of piety in an
Indian wigwam, which I would gladly transfer to these pages did their
limits admit. It could be proved by overwhelming testimony, that the
Indian is as susceptible of good as his white brother. But it is not
necessary in this plac