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is in the grass and flower, in the tree and torrent, in the beast and fish, in bird and butterfly; it girds us with the ocean, and it crowns us with the stars. The spirit of beauty is in the life of all; but the life of beauty thus animating creation is the spirit of goodness, the Spirit of God. Moral beauty is also in human life, — in the affections that sweeten it, in the sentiments that expand it, in the principles that ennoble and sustain it, in the charities that bless it; in every generous deed or suffering, from the cup of cold water bestowed, to the chalice of martyrdom accepted. Yes, of a truth and certainty the spirit of beauty is everywhere; vital in action, lovely in manifestation, grand and fair to the eye, pleasant to the ear, genial to the feelings, calming to the brain, a cordial for the vexed spirit, ease for the tired senses; a deathless desire in the hope of a deathless life.

ART. V.- PARKMAN'S JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, author of "Pioneers of France in the New World." Second Edition. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1867. IN the course of his studies of the history of the first settlers and adventurers in North America, Mr. Parkman gives us, in his last volume, a narrative of the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians to Christianity. The space of time covered by it is that of about a generation of men; and it embraces the whole course of a wonderful and romantic enterprise, from the arrival of Le Jeune at Quebec in 1632, until the mission was practically abandoned on account of the extermination or dispersal of the tribes among whom it had sought converts. It is the story of marvellous adventures, achieved with almost superhuman zeal and patience; carries us among scenes and people, habits of action and thought, and traits of character and passion, hitherto little known, and always imperfectly and erroneously described. The Jesuit and the savage in North America, two

hundred years ago, have had no painter, until Mr. Parkman has set them before us in vivid colors, and brought out the effects of their influence, the one upon the other; “full,” as he says, "of dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the political destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of its native population."

The materials for this investigation are copious and graphic. For forty years, the Superior of the Mission sent annually, to the head of the Order of Jesuits at Paris, a long and detailed report of all that had been accomplished or attempted by those under his charge, accompanied by or embodying the minute reports of his subordinates. These reports, published in France as they were received, were widely read at the time, and served to arouse and keep burning the religious ardor which sustained the Mission; and they now furnish a store-house of information, not only as to the proceedings of the missionaries themselves, but of the condition, character, and usages of the primitive inhabitants of this country. Mr. Parkman says that the closest examination has left him no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that the "Relations" hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical documents. Besides these printed records, there remain in manuscript a mass of additional reports, memoirs, journals, and official and private letters of the actors in this history, of which the author has availed himself to heighten the accuracy and brilliancy of his representation.

From the interesting narrative of strange and often tragic adventure, full of instances of singular and romantic devotion, which this book contains, there come out before us two separate series of characterization, each of a high order of importance, the picture of the aboriginal inhabitant, and that of the exiled Jesuit. Mr. Parkman has given much pains to unfolding the real condition, physical, mental, and social, of the former. He has collected and collated a large mass of facts with regard to it, and arrayed and presented them carefully and clearly. He strips the Indian of much which romance and poetry had invested him with, in the character of

the sage, the chivalrous warrior, the philosophical monotheist; but he lets us see him with many virtues and some refinements engrafted upon a truly savage, almost brutal, and eminently selfish nature. The reader will find, we think, that he had been led both to over-estimate and to under-estimate the approaches that this savage people had made towards civilization. We have ourselves been surprised to learn, on the one hand, to how great an extent they were found by the first discoverers accustomed to a stationary life and agricultural pursuits; and, on the other, how common was the practice of cannibalism, which has been of late denied of even much less cultivated tribes.

Mr. Parkman's summary of their religious belief, which he examines much in detail, closes thus:

"It is obvious that the Indian mind has never seriously occupied itself with any of the higher themes of thought. The beings of its belief are not impersonations of the forces of Nature, the courses of human destiny, or the movements of human intellect, will, and passion. In the midst of Nature, the Indian knew nothing of her laws. His perpetual reference of her phenomena to occult agencies forestalled inquiry and precluded inductive reasoning. If the wind blew with violence, it was because the water-lizard, which makes the wind, had crawled out of his pool; if the lightning was sharp and frequent, it was because the young of the thunder-bird were restless in their nest; if a blight fell upon the corn, it was because the Corn Spirit was angry; and if the beavers were shy and difficult to catch, it was because they had taken offence at seeing the bones of one of their race thrown to a dog. Well, and even highly developed, in a few instances, I allude especially to the Iroquois,― with respect to certain points of material concernment, the mind of the Indian in other respects was and is almost hopelessly stagnant. The very traits that raise him above the servile races are hostile to the kind and degree of civilization which those races so easily attain. His intractable spirit of independence, and the pride which forbids him to be an imitator, reinforce but too strongly that savage lethargy of mind from which it is so hard to rouse him. No race, perhaps, ever offered greater difficulties to those laboring for its improvement.

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"To sum up the results of this examination, the primitive Indian was as savage in his religion as in his life. He was divided between

fetich-worship, and that next degree of religious development which consists in the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His conception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have been long in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets, rhetoricians, and sentimentalists."—pp. lxxxviii. et seq.

The student of the Indian character will find much to repay him in the details of savage life opened up by these missionary labors. He will find the courtesy of the Indian sadly smirched by the treachery that it covered,―treachery to friend as well as foe. He will find his justice always leaning to the side of the strongest; and his courage that of the bravo and assassin, not that of the soldier or knight-errant. In fact, he will find him destitute of that necessary foundation of all the virtues and graces, truth; and that it is impossible to make the ideal Indian of romance out of a being who is always false, either through fear or cunning.

The tribes of Indians with whom we have chiefly to do in these volumes are mainly the Hurons, living near the lake that bears their name; and the Iroquois, occupying what is now Northern New York. The Hurons were the chief field of the missionary efforts of the Jesuits; and the Iroquois, or the "Five Nations," the bitter enemies, and eventually the exterminators, of the Hurons. Even then two nationalities were allied in race, and spoke a cognate language; and they did not differ much in their stage of civilization, or ordinary habits and usages, although the political organization of the Iroquois was more complete and effective than that of their neighbors. The general descriptions of one nation cover the social customs of both, but the following refers more particularly to the Hurons:

"Among these tribes there was no individual ownership of land, but each family had, for the time, exclusive right to as much as it saw fit to

cultivate. The clearing process a most toilsome one consisted in hacking off branches, piling them together with brushwood around the standing trunks, and setting fire to the whole. The squaws, working with their hoes of wood and bone among the charred stumps, sowed their corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, sunflowers, and Huron hemp. No manure was used; but, at intervals of from ten to thirty years, when the soil was exhausted and firewood distant, the village was abandoned and a new one built.

"There was little game in the Huron country; and here, as among the Iroquois, the staple of food was Indian corn, cooked without salt. in a variety of forms, each more odious than the last. Venison was a luxury found only at feasts; dog-flesh was in high esteem; and in some of the towns captive bears were fattened for festive occasions. These tribes were far less improvident than the roving Algonquins, and stores of provision were laid up against a season of want. Their main stock of corn was buried in caches, or deep holes in the earth, either within or without the houses.

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"In respect to the arts of life, all these stationary tribes were in advance of the wandering hunters of the North. The women made a species of earthen pot for cooking, but these were supplanted by the copper kettles of the French traders. They wove rush mats with no little skill. They spun twine from hemp, by the primitive process of rolling it on their thighs; and of this twine they made nets. They extracted oil from fish and from the seeds of the sunflower, the latter apparently only for the purposes of the toilet. They pounded their maize in huge mortars of wood, hollowed by alternate burnings and scrapings."- pp. xxix. et seq.

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"Their dress was chiefly of skins, cured with smoke after the wellknown Indian mode. That of the women, according to the Jesuits, was more modest than that of our most pious ladies of France.' The young girls on festal occasions must be excepted from this commendation, as they wore merely a kilt from the waist to the knee, besides the wampum decorations of the breast and arms. . . . The men, in summer, were nearly naked, those of a kindred tribe wholly so, with the sole exception of their moccasins. In winter they were clad in tunics and leggins of skin, and at all seasons, on occasions of ceremony, were wrapped from head to foot in robes of beaver and otter furs, sometimes of the greatest value.... When in full dress, they were painted with ochre, white clay, soot, and the red juice of certain berries. They practised tattooing, sometimes covering the whole body with indelible devices.