Ex

separation. A mysterious, but all-wise, Providence held them apart. For thousands of years, the earth, as it revolved on its axis, had presented to the sun and the stars the vast double continent of America, shrouded in moral and intellectual darkness. tending from pole almost to pole, it embraced, in its geographical features, all the forms of sublimity and beauty of scenery, and every advantage which can flow from the arrangement of land and water, rivers and lakes, mountains and meadows; and in the several departments of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, an unrivalled richness of material and magnificence of display. Its surface, for the most part, remained under the deep shadows of primeval forests, and was traversed by roaming tribes of benighted savages. It is true that, on some parts of the continent, there are vestiges of a peculiar and inexplicable form of barbaric splendor, in vast and shapeless mounds of earth, and structures of masonry and statuary; but there is no indication whatever of the existence and action, at any time or to any extent, on any part of its entire length and breadth, of an element of moral, social and political progress.

The character of the aboriginal American cannot fail to be a subject of interest in all coming times. It exhibited many of the traits and faculties of human nature in an extraordinary development of dignity and strength. Fortitude and manly endurance,

heroism and patriotism, will ever find their brightest exemplars in warrior chiefs whose spheres of glory were the wild scenes and gloomy recesses of American forests. But the traditions that relate their story can scarcely be made to take their place among the records of real and authenticated events. They pass before the mind like shadowy visions of the imagination. We read them as we do the pages of an epic. The mysterious destiny of extinction, which is taking effect upon the race, pressing it off from the surface of the earth, seems to apply to its history also, which is crowded out from its proper department, exhaled as it were into ideal forms, and transferred to the sphere of fancy and romance. The reason of this is obvious. Their origin and progress are buried in utter oblivion. We behold them, as they appeared but for a moment, as in a dream, and then vanished away. They have told us no story of their earlier fortunes, and they have left no traces of their existence, or influence upon the condition of mankind. In that highest sense of history, in which it is to be regarded as the narrative of the continuous progress of humanity, as the memorial of stages of advancement, one leading on to another, by the law of cause and effect in the moral world, no space is occupied by the American tribes; and it is the same, in the comprehensive view I am now taking of the connection of the career of the human race with the two grand divi

sions of the earth, as if the foot of man had never trodden the soil of America until the Europeans colonized it.

But while silence and darkness thus brooded over the western hemisphere for more than fifty centuries, the eastern was the theatre of a series of movements and vicissitudes, constituting the substance of ancient history, by which Providence was enunciating to mankind the successive primary lessons of its education, and preparing it to enter upon the career of moral and social advancement designed for it by nature, and which, imperceptible in its early stages, has become a visibly rapid progress in our day, but must be seen in results far higher than have yet been reached, before this earth can reflect in undimmed lustre the glory of Him who created it for the abode of man, and placed him upon it to cultivate and adorn its surface, develop its infinite riches, and bring out, into the highest enjoyment and the brightest light, all the capacities and beauties of its occupants and objects.

Before we bring the Old World to the period of contact with the New, let us pass, in brief and comprehensive enumeration, the grand events, which rise like Alpine summits along the outline of its history, and mark the gradual adaptation of mankind for the new and more quickening influences which sprung into action when America was intro

duced within the circle of the civilization of Christendom.

The great empires, which had first passed over the field of vision of inspired prophets, followed each other on the stage of historic reality. The successive and slowly advancing preliminary steps, by which a revelation of divine truth sufficient to satisfy the wants, and able to elevate and purify to the highest degree the nature, of the soul of man, was to be ushered in, one by one took place. The lust of empire, calling to its aid the passions of humanity in ages of violence and ignorance, had swept vast armies over the face of nations, and, under an overruling Hand, had stirred, and impelled, and guided the currents of power and thought. length, through the agency, direct and remote, of these, and all the subsidiary events and influences in their train, the energies of intellect had become sufficiently exercised to give rise to systems of philosophy and processes of mental culture and reflection, and thus to provide a foundation for the reception of a spiritual theology, and the elements of a true and absolute morality, depending upon and embraced within it.

At

While such influences had been at work over the Gentile world, how wonderful were the arrangements by which a suitable centre of diffusion was provided for the heavenly illumination ! At a period far down beyond the most distant glimmer

ings of profane history, a particular family was selected and led by the Divine Hand to a region, situated at the threshold of the three great continents, on a conspicuous spot, near which all communications of commerce, travel and war, from or to Europe, Asia and Africa, necessarily passed. For wise and obvious purposes, the chosen family was there kept secluded from the rest of the world for centuries. How admirably adapted was the territory to this purpose! It was a fertile and most salubrious valley, between ranges of mountain-barriers rising through the clouds, in many points, to wintry elevations of temperature, comprising, at different altitudes on its descending slopes, every variety of climate and production, and watered through its entire length by a river, rising among wild mountains at one extremity, expanding at intervals into small inland seas, and at the other extremity not flowing, as rivers elsewhere do, into an open sea-for that would have defeated the design of the temporary seclusion of the nation — but mysteriously vanishing beneath the barren sands of inhospitable and untraversable deserts. While the Divine Wisdom required the sequestration of that people for such a length of time from the rest of the world, and their imprisonment within such limited boundaries, its Benevolence selected for their residence a region containing within its narrow confines every variety of soil