their generations had been dwelling. The least we can do for them, for science and letters, is to preserve their history. This we have done. We have explored their antiquities, studied and written their language and deduced its grammar, recorded their traditions, traced their wanderings, and embodied in one form or another their customs, their employments, their superstitions, and their religious belief. But there is in this connection one thing which, perhaps, poetry and romance can alone do, or can best do. It is to go back to the epoch of this war, for example; paint vividly and affectingly the condition of the tribes which then wandered over, rather than occupied, the boundless wilderness extending from the margin of seacoast covered by the colonists to the line of New York and Canada. The history of man, like the roll of the Prophet, is full, within and without, of mourning, lamentation, and woe; but I do not know that in all that history there is a situation of such mournful interest as this.

The terrible truth had at length flashed upon the Indian chief that the presence of civilization, even of humane, peaceful, and moral civilization, was incompatible with the existence of Indians. He comprehended at length the tremendous power which knowledge, arts, law, government, confer upon social man. He looked in vain to the physical energies, the desperate, random, uncombined, and desultory exertions, the occasional individual virtues and abilities of barbarism, for an equal power to resist it. He saw the advancing population of the colonies. He saw shiploads of white men day after day coming ashore from some land beyond the sea, of which he could only know that it was over-peopled. Every day the woodman's axe sounded nearer and nearer. Every day some valuable fishing or hunting ground or corn-land or meadow passed out of the Indian possession, and was locked up forever in the mortmain grasp of an English title. What, then, where, then, was the hope of the Indian? Of the tribes far off to the East- the once terrible Tarrateens - they had no knowledge, but more dread than of the English themselves. The difficulty of communication, the diversity of languages, the want of a press, the unsocial habits and policy of all nomadic races, made alliances with the Five Nations in New York with any considerable tribe out of New Englandimpracticable. Civilization, too, was pushing its prow up the Hudson even more adventurously than upon the Con

necticut and Charles, the Merrimac, the Piscataqua and the Kennebec. They were encompassed about as by the embrace of a serpent, contracting its folds closer at every turn and struggle of its victim, and leisurely choosing its own time to crush him to death. Such were the condition and prospects of the Indians of New England at the beginning of Philip's War.

It is doubtful if that celebrated chief intended to provoke such a war, or if he ever anticipated for it a successful issue. But there is no doubt that after it had begun he threw his whole great powers into the conduct of it; that he formed and moved a confederacy of almost all the aborigines of New England to its support, that he exhausted every resource of bravery and Indian soldiership and statesmanship, that he died at last for a land and for a throne which he could not save. Our fathers called him King Philip, in jest. I would not wrong his warrior shade by comparing him with any five in six of the kings of Europe of his day or ours; and I sincerely wish that the elaborate jests and puns put forth by Hubbard and Mather upon occasion of his death were erased from the records of New England.

In the course of this decisive struggle with the colonists the Indians, some time when all human help seemed to fail, turned in anger and despair to the gods of their gloomy and peculiar worship. Beneath the shades of the forest, which had stood from the creation, at the entrance of caverns at midnight, in tempest and thunder, they shed the human blood and uttered the incantations which their superstitions prescribed, and called up the spirits of evil to blast these daring strangers who neither feared nor honored nor recognized the ancient divinities of the Indians. The spirits they had raised abandoned them. Their offering was not accepted: their fires of sacrifice were put out. The long, dreary sigh of the nightwind in the tops of the pines alone answered their misguided and erring prayers. Then they felt that their doom was sealed, and the cry, piercing, bitter, and final, of a perishing nation arose to heaven.

Let me solicit your attention to another view of this subject. I have urged thus far that our future Waverley Novels and poetry would contain a good deal of positive information which our histories do not contain,- gleanings, if you please, of what the licensed reapers have, intentionally or uninten

tionally, let fall from their hands; and that this information Iwould be authentic and valuable. I now add that they would have another use. They would make the information which our histories do contain more accessible and more engaging to the great body of readers, even if they made no addition to its absolute quantity. They would melt down, as it were, and stamp the heavy bullion into a convenient, universal circulating medium. They would impress the facts, the lessons of history, more deeply, and incorporate them more intimately into the general mind and heart, and current and common knowledge of the people.

All history, all records of the past, of the acts, opinions, and characters of those who have preceded us in the great procession of the generations, is full of instruction and written for instruction. Especially may we say so of our own history. But, of all which it teaches, its moral lessons are, perhaps, the most valuable. It holds up to our emulation and love great models of patriotism and virtue. It introduces us into the presence of venerated ancestors, "of whom the world was not worthy." It teaches us to appreciate and cherish this good land, these free forms of government, this pure worship of the conscience, these schools of popular learning, by reminding us through how much tribulation not our own, but others

these best gifts of God to man have been secured to us. It corrects the cold selfishness which would regard ourselves, our day, and our generation as a separate and insulated portion of man and time; and, awakening our sympathies for those who have gone before, it makes us mindful, also, of those who are to follow, and thus binds us to our fathers and to our posterity by a lengthening and golden cord. It helps us to realize the serene and august presence and paramount claims of our country, and swells the deep and full flood of American feeling.

I say that he who writes the romance of history, as Scott has written it, shall teach these lessons and exert and diffuse these influences even better than he who confines himself to what I may call the reality of history. Much of what history relates produces no impression upon the moral sentiments or the imagination. It is truth, fact; but it is just what you do not want to know, and are none the wiser for knowing. Now he who writes the romance of history takes his choice of all its ample but incongruous material.

He accommodates the show of things to the desires and the needs of the immortal, moral nature. To vary a figure of Milton's, instead of crowding his net, as Time crowds his, with all things precious and vile,— bright gems, seaweed mixed with sand, bones of fishes,he only dives for and brings up coral and pearl and shells golden-valved and rainbow-colored, murmuring to the ear like an Æolian harp.... He tells the truth, to be sure; but he does not tell the whole truth, for that would be sometimes misplaced and discordant. He tells something more than the truth, too, remembering that, though man is not of imagination all compact, he is yet, in part, a creature of imagination, and can be reached and perfected by a law of his nature in part only through the imagination. . . . The Richard of Scott in his general character and principal fortunes, in his chronology and geography, so to speak, is the Richard of history. But the reason you know him better is this: the particular situations in which you see him in "Ivanhoe" and the Crusaders, the conversations he holds, his obstreperous contest of drink and music with the holy clerk in the cell, that more glorious contest with the traitors in the wood, with the Normans in the castle, the scene in his tent in which he was so nearly assassinated, and that in Saladin's tent where he challenged him in all love and honor to do mortal battle for the possession of Jerusalem,- these are all supplied by the imagination of the writer to the imagination of the reader. Probably they all happened just as they are set forth, but you can't exactly prove it out of any book of history. They are all probable: they are exactly consistent with what we do know and can prove. But the record is lost by time and accident. They lie beyond the province of reason; but faith and imagination stretch beyond that province, and complete the shadowy and imperfect revelation. . . .

I do not know that I can better illustrate this difference between the romance and the reality of history, and in some respects the superiority of the former for teaching and impressing mere historical truth, than by going back to the ten years which immediately preceded the battle of Lexington. If idle wishes were not sinful as well as idle, that of all time past is the period in which we might all wish to have lived. Yet how meagre and unsatisfactory is the mere written history of that day! Indeed, there is hardly anything there for history. The tea was thrown overboard, to be sure, and the

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Gaspée burned; town meetings were held, and committees of correspondence chosen; and touching appeals, of pathos and argument and eloquence unequalled, addressed to the king and people of England in behalf of their oppressed subjects and brethren of America. And when History has told you this, she is silent. You must go to Scott or evoke the still mightier Shakspere or Homer if you would truly know what that day was, what the people of that day were,— if you would share in that strong and wide excitement, see that feeling, not loud but deep, of anger and grief and conscious worth and the sense of violated rights, in that mingled and luxurious emotion of hope and apprehension with which the heart of the whole country throbbed and labored as the heart of a man. And how would Scott reveal to you the spirit of that age? He would place you in the middle of a group of citizens of Boston going home from the Old South, perhaps, or Faneuil Hall, where James Otis or Josiah Quincy or Samuel Adams had been speaking, and let you listen to their conversation. He would take you to their meeting on Sunday when the congregation stood up in prayer, and the venerable pastor adverted to the crisis and asked for strength and guidance from above to meet it. He would remark to you that varied expression which ran instantaneously over the general countenance of the assembly, and show you in that varied expression the varied fortunes of America - the short sorrow, the long joy, the strife, the triumph, the agony, and the glory. In that congregation you might see in one seat the worn frame of a mother whose husband followed the banners of Wolfe, and fell with him on the Plains of Abraham, shuddering with apprehension lest such a life and such a death await her only son, yet striving, as became a matron of New England, for grace to make even that sacrifice. You might see old men who dragged Sir William Pepperell's cannon along the beach at Louisburg, now only regretting that they had not half so much youthful vigor left to fight their king as they then used up in fighting his enemies. You read in yonder eye of fire the energy and ardor of a statesman like John Adams, seeing clear through that day's business and beholding the bright spot beyond the gloom. You see the blood mount into that cheek of manly beauty, betraying the youthful Warren's dream of fame. But, as the pastor proceeded, and his feelings rose and his voice swelled