rudeness of conquest and the needs of the day, whose bivouac fires
blacken the sweetest forest glades. I have come prepared to see all
this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness to distrust or
defame. On the contrary, while I will not be so obliging as to confound
ugliness with beauty, discord with harmony, and laud and be contented
with all I meet, when it conflicts with my best desires and tastes, I
trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps
to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked
from this chaos, and with a curiosity as ardent, but not so selfish as
that of Macbeth, to call up the apparitions of future kings from the
strange ingredients of the witch's caldron. Thus, I will not grieve that
all the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this
caldron, but believe it will have Medea's virtue, and reproduce them in
the form of new intellectual growths, since centuries cannot again adorn
the land with such.

On this most beautiful beach of smooth white pebbles, interspersed with
agates and cornelians, for those who know how to find them, we stepped,
not like the Indian, with some humble offering, which, if no better than
an arrow-head or a little parched corn, would, he judged, please the
Manitou, who looks only at the spirit in which it is offered. Our visit
was so far for a religious purpose that one of our party went to inquire
the fate of some Unitarian tracts left among the woodcutters a year or
two before. But the old Manitou, though, daunted like his children by
the approach of the fire-ships which he probably considered demons of a
new dynasty, he had suffered his woods to be felled to feed their pride,
had been less patient of an encroachment, which did not to him seem so
authorized by the law of the strongest, and had scattered those leaves
as carelessly as the others of that year.