แ Again he rises to the upper air: his In vain, for hostile vengeance follows there. Now see! the monster spouts away breath, Fanned by, O Innocence, thy sacred sighs, The floweret smells and blossoms to the skies; How horrible to tell, and yet how true! Lashes the foaming surge, then sinks to The plant is nourished by a bloody dew. death; His native element is no retreat: He pours his life-blood at his conqueror's feet. Would that his life alone might ocean stain! Ah, no! the spirit of departed Cain 'I hear the thunder roar, the dying shriek, The raven flap, the terrors of his beak: He sees the tumult in his airy way, He scents the carnage, and he stoops for prey. O righteous Heaven! why is almighty love So long delayed? why lingers yet my dove? Henceforth shall rise and walk the earth The earth shall mourn, and desolate with Oh, while ye grasp the bolts of heaven, for- Such wonders shall be known in future times. Unterrified, from cloud to cloud he climbs, He sees a subjugated world below. gaze Pursue this sailor of the solar blaze. "The time shall come so speaks almighty | The human form, beneath her magic shock, doomBreaks from the rude recesses of the rock: When human art shall triumph o'er the The frowning quarry that no tempest fears, tomb: The body formed with such transcendent art, Such nicety of skill in every part, Shall, though the seat of an immortal mind, Vanish from earth and leave its shade behind. Thy tame obsequious shadow in thy way, Beyond where even eagles dare to soar; Then, son of Adam, count thy mighty gains: Thy cold insensate shadow still survives: That bears the brunt of heaven for endless years, When touched by Art and fashioned by her skill Dissolves in female beauty at her will. Behold, enrapturing every heart and hand, Cold and serene the marble virgin stand! What harmony, what symmetry, what grace, Move o'er each limb and languish on the face! How loose, how lovely, all the tresses flow Upon that bosom's pure and lustrous snow! She frowns each bold intruder to reprove: Ah! why does not the lovely vision move? Wherefore this silence? why this steadfast air? Rouse from thy slumber! speak, thou lovely fair! Alas! how vain is all this blaze of skill! still. Stay, and this lovely prodigy behold: To gain possession of this beauteous block; Poets shall sing its praise in strains so sweet That even listening angels might repeat; From distant nations pilgrims still shall come “Still, Art shall triumph with the conqueror's And gaze till Admiration's self be dumb : wreath, 'Tis still bereft of an almighty breath, And teach the rugged marble how to breathe; And stands a steadfast monument of death. Unconquered man, by Science guided far, Shall boldly measure every brilliant star, Till all these orbs in glory so replete Shall roll in silent homage at his feet. Here is a triumph for thy honored brow : Is man encircled with the laurel now? We spoke of distant countries In regions strange and fair, And of the wondrous beings And curious customs there; Of perfumed lamps on the Ganges "This conquest, purchased by no bloody And the dark and silent Brahmins, stains, Among thy kindred no distinction gains; In vain the lights of yonder heaven may plead If Carnage does not consecrate the deed." The angel paused. Her face, so fair to view, Looked lovelier in the drops of sorrowing dew; The patriarch gazed: the Vision sunk in air, But Mercy's tears were still remaining there. Who worship the lotus-flower; Of the wretched dwarfs of Lapland— Broad-headed, wide-mouthed and smallWho crouch round their oil-fires, cooking, And chatter and scream and bawl. And the maidens earnestly listened Till at last we spoke no more; Translation of CHARLES G. LELAND. THE FLYING HEAD. A LEGEND OF SACONDAGA LAKE. "The great God hath sent us signs in the sky; we have heard uncommon noise in the heavens, and have seen. heads fall down upon the earth!"-Speech of Tahayadoris, a Mohawk sachem, at Albany, October 25, 1689. T It hath telltale tongues-this casing air That walls us in-and their wandering breath That clings to that ruthless deed of death, HE country about the head-waters of the great Mohegan as the Hudson is sometimes called-though abounding in game and fish, was never, in the recollection of the oldest Indians living, nor in that of their fathers' fathers, the permanent residence of any one tribe. From the black mountain-tarns where the eastern fork takes its rise to the silver strand of Lake Pleasant, through which the western branch makes its way after rising in Sacondaga Lake, the wilderness that intervenes and all the mountains round about the fountain-heads of the great river have from time immemorial been infested by a class of beings with whom no good man would ever wish to come in contact. The young men of the Mohawk have, indeed, often traversed it when in years gone by they went on the warpath after the hostile tribes of the North, and the scattered and wandering remnants of their people, with an occasional hunting-party from the degenerate bands that survive at St. Regis, will yet occasionally be tempted over these haunted grounds in quest of the game that still finds a refuge in that mountain-region. The evil shapes that were formerly so troublesome to the red hunter seem in these later days to have become less restless at his presence, and, whether it be that the day of their power has gone by or that their vindietiveness has relented at witnessing the fate which seems to be universally overtaking the people whom they once delighted to persecute, certain it is that the few Indians who now find their way to this part of the country are never molested. The Flying Head, which is supposed to have first driven the original possessors of these hunting-grounds, whosoever they were, from their homes, and which, as long as tradition runneth back, in the old day before the whites came hither, guarded them from the occupancy of every neighboring tribe, has not been seen for many years by any credible witness, though there are those who insist that it has more than once appeared to them, hovering, as their fathers used to describe it, over the lake in which it first had its birth. The existence of this fearful monster, however, has never been disputed. Rude representations of it are still occasion ally met with in the crude designs of those | Ontario and all move away to a new home degenerate aborigines who earn a scant sub- beyond its broad waters. The wild rice, sistence by making birchen baskets and or- of which some had been brought into their namented pouches for such travellers as are country by a runner from a distant nation, curious in their manufacture of wampum and would, they thought, support them in their porcupine-quills, and the origin and history perilous voyage along the shores of the great of the Flying Head survive, while even the water where it grows in such profusion, and name of the tribe whose crimes first called they believed that, once safely beyond the it into existence has passed away for ever. lake, it would be easy enough to find a new It was a season of great severity with home abounding in game upon those flowery that forgotten people whose council-fires plains which, as they had heard, lay like one were lighted on the mountain-promontory immense garden beyond the chain of inland that divides Sacondaga from the sister-lake seas. into which it discharges itself. A long and severe winter with but little snow had killed the herbage at its roots, and the moose and deer had trooped off to the more luxuriant pastures along the Mohawk, whither the hunters of the hills dared not follow them. The fishing, too, failed, and the famine became so devouring among the mountains that whole families who had no hunters to provide for them perished outright. The young men would no longer throw the slender product of the chase into the common stock, and the women and children had to maintain life as well as they could upon the roots and berries the woods afforded them. The sufferings of the tribe became at length so galling that the young and enterprising began to talk of migrating from the ancient seat of their people, and, as it was impossible, surrounded as they were by hostile tribes, merely to shift their hunting-grounds for a season and return to them at some more auspicious period, it was proposed that if they could effect a secret march to the great lake off to the west of them they should launch their canoes upon The old men of the tribe were indignant at the bare suggestion of leaving the bright streams and sheltered valleys amid which their springtime of life had passed so happily. They doubted the existence of the garden-regions of which their children spoke, and they thought that if there were indeed such a country it was madness to attempt to reach it in the way proposed. They said, too, that the famine was a scourge which the Master of Life inflicted upon his people for their crimes, that if its pains were endured with the constancy and firmness that became warriors the visitation would soon pass away, but that those who fled from it would only war with their destiny, and that chastisement would follow them, in some shape, wheresoever they might flee. Finally, they added that they would rather perish by inches on their native hills-they would rather die that moment-than leave them for ever to revel in plenty upon stranger-plains. "Be it so! They have spoken!" exclaimed a fierce and insolent youth, springing to his feet and casting a furious glance around the council as the aged chief who had thus addressed it resumed his seat. "Be the |