Sometimes, as an artist is lifting the curtain to expose his picture to view, with the removal of the first corner of drapery the connoisseur catches a glimpse of an exquisite bit of drawing and color which convinces him that the entire work is a great and beautiful one. When Forrest made his entrance in Virginius, with an irritated and impetuous air, the earliest sound of his voice, so deep and resonant, coining and propelling its words in air with such easy and percussive precision, seized the attention of the auditory and gave assurance that something uncommon was to come. With a quick articulation and an expostulating tone he said, "Why did you make him Decemvir, and first Decemvir, too?" He refers to the shameless Appius Claudius, and the key-note of the play is struck by his inflection of the words.

He is not displeased on seeing reason for suspecting that his daughter—an only and idolized child left him by his dead wife—is in love with the noble young Lucius Icilius, for whom he has an excellent liking. He sends for Virginia, who is still a schoolgirl, that he may question her. She comes in, and sits upon his knee, saying, "Well, father, what is your will?" At the sight of her his face lights as if a sunbeam had suddenly fallen on it, and his voice has a sweet, low, half-smothered tone, as if the words were spoken in his heart, and only their softened echoes came forth:

The parental tenderness of his manner, his speech, his kiss, seemed to combine the love of a father and a mother in one. His hand meanwhile was playing with her tresses in a way suggestive of unpurposed instinctive fondness, exquisitely touching.

The transition was perfect when, meeting Icilius, after scrutinizing him earnestly, as though to read his very soul, the rough soldier and honest man succeeds to the adoring father:

And when, a little later, he led his daughter to her lover and formally betrothed them in these eloquent words, his whole frame betraying the struggle at composure, it was a consummate moral painting of humanity in one of its most sacred aspects:

The plot progresses, and the air is thick with the clamor and strife of Rome, the hates of parties and the reverberation of war. Virginius is called to a distance with the army. His daughter is left under the guardianship of her uncle. One day the lustful Appius has a sight of her passing in the street.

inflames him. He charges one of his minions to seize her, under the pretext that she is the child of one of his slaves, sold to Virginius and falsely proclaimed his daughter. With details of cruel atrocity the deed is accomplished, in spite of the desperate interference of Icilius. Lucius is sent as a messenger to the camp to inform Virginius. Lucius tells him he is wanted immediately at Rome. With a start and a look of dread anxiety he demands to know wherefore. The messenger prevaricates and delays, but, on being chided and commanded to speak out, says, "Hear me, then, with patience." Virginius replies, while his restless fingers and the working of his toes, seen through the openings of his sandals, most effectually contradict the words, "Well, I am patient."

The change of his countenance while uttering the word "father," from the expression it wore on the word "silence," was like an unexpected sunburst through a gloomy cloud. As Lucius went on in his narration, the breathing of the listener thickened with intensity of suspense, his heart beat with remittent throb, and he started at each point in the outrage like one receiving electric shocks.

He departed for Rome, where his poor daughter was guarded in the house of her uncle, Numitorius, in the deepest distress and terror. He entered; and such was his expression as he cried, "My child! my child!" and she rushed into his arms, that there were scarcely ever many dry eyes in the theatre at that moment. Then it was something divine to be seen, and never to be forgotten, to behold how he turned from his blistering and disdainful apostrophe to the villain who had dared set his panders after her, and, taking her precious head in his hands, gazed in her face, saying,—

They go to the Forum, where Appius is seated on the tribunal, supported by the lictors and an armed troop. The acting of Forrest in the trial-scene that followed was as genuine and moving, set in as bold relief, as anything the American theatre has known. Who that saw him can ever forget the imperial front with which, bearing Virginia on his arm, he advanced before the judgment-seat,—the firm step, the indomitable face, the parental love that seemed to throw a thousand invisible tendrils around his child to hold her up! The tableau caused a silence that was absolute, and was maintained so long that the suspense had begun to be painful, when the kingly voice of Virginius broke the spell:

The strong, lucid, cutting tones in which these words were spoken went vibrating into the breasts of the listeners, and thrilled them with sympathetic echoes. The perjured witness was summoned by the recreant judge. And the next passage of the play had a moral meaning deep enough, and was represented with a truth and power grand enough, to turn the stage for the time being into a pulpit and make the world tremble at its preaching.

Now the interest grows yet intenser and the influence of the actor yet more penetrating in its simplicity and terrible beauty. Virginius finds that nothing can save his daughter from the last profanation of the tyrant except her immediate immolation by himself. For a moment he is lost in a reverie, striving to think what he can do. By chance he perceives a knife lying on the stall of a butcher. At the sight of this providential instrument an electric change passes over his face, revealing all his purpose with a grim joy, like the lightning-flash at night illumining the murky sky and giving an instantaneous outline of the clouds loaded with the coming storm. He moves gradually towards the stall, smiling on Virginia a tender smile, full of the consolation he sees in the prospect of her deliverance even by death. He pats her lovingly on the shoulder while changing her from his left arm, that with it he may reach the knife. He stealthily seizes it and passes it behind him from the left hand to the right. With deep fondness he breathes, "My dear Virginia," and gives her quick and fervent kisses, which he appears striving to press into her very soul. Tears seem to moisten his words,—

And, swift as motion of the human arm can make it, the knife pierces her heart. The storm has burst, the lightning has wreathed its folds around the consecrated instrument of the work, and now the thunder-tones of his voice crash through the theatre in the awful exclamation,—

His exit here used to excite the wildest huzzas, the men in the pit standing with their hats in their uplifted hands, and the women in the boxes waving their handkerchiefs.

Virginius heads the revolution, in which the revolted troops and the commons join. The tyranny is hurled to the dust, the people freed, and Appius lodged in prison. But the wronged and wretched father is broken down by the preternatural horror and excitement he has undergone, and loses his reason. He is next seen in his own desolate home, with a pale and haggard face, and a look half wild, half dreamy, talking to himself:

His call of Virginia was a call dictated by a dethroned mind. It was a sound that appeared to come from a mysterious vault. There was a kind of semi-wakefulness in it, like the utterance of a thought in a dream. It had a touch of pity. It was an inverted form of sound, that turned back whence it issued and fell dead where it was born, feeling that there was no reply for it to keep it alive. Yet, after a pause, he fancies he hears her answering; and he rapidly asks,—

And then, with an entranced listening, he follows the illusory voice around to different parts of the room, in the vain attempt to find its source. An apathetic stare, a blank, miserable stupor, succeeds, soon broken by the fancy that he hears her shrieking in the prison for rescue from Appius,—and he darts away. Appius, meanwhile, is planning an escape, and gloatingly counting over in imagination the victims he will pick out to expiate for his present shame, when the shattered Virginius, appalling even in his ruins, rushes in upon him, wildly crying, "Give me my daughter!" The affrighted prisoner replies,—

In his distraught fury, feeling over his body for some weapon he discovers his own hands. A wild and eager delight shudders through him as, holding these naked instruments before him, he springs on the terrified Appius and strangles him to death. Lucius, Icilius, and Numitorius enter, bearing the urn of Virginia. The wronged father and sufferer looks up, and sighs, with a bewildered gaze,—

They call him by name. He makes no response. Icilius places the urn in his right hand, with the single word, "Virginia." He looks at Icilius and the urn, at Numitorius and Lucius, seems struck by their mourning garb, looks again at the urn, breaks into a passion of tears, and falls on the neck of Icilius, exclaiming, "Virginia!"

METAMORA.

The famous prize-play of Metamora, by John Augustus Stone, is not a work of much genius, and if published would have no literary rank; yet it had all that was essential, in the striking merit of furnishing the genius of the enactor of its leading character the conditions for compassing a popular success of the most remarkable description. With his performance of Metamora, Forrest impressed the masses of the American people in a degree rarely precedented, and won a continental celebrity full of idiomatic enthusiasm. Of course there were good reasons for this warm favor from the surrendered many, despite the disdain of the squeamish few, who can generally enjoy nothing, only conceitedly criticise everything.

In the first place, the subject was indigenous, and thus came home to the American heart and curiosity. In the imagination of our people for more than a century the race of the aborigines of the land were clothed with romantic associations and regretted with a sort of national remorse. The disinterestedness of the fancy and the soul, relieved from all proximity to their squalor, ferocity, and vice, with a beautiful pity lamented their wrongs, their evanescence, and the rapid disappearance of the wigwam and papoose and war-dance and canoe of the painted tribes from hill and glen and wood and lake. In this wide-spread sentimental interest the play took hold of powerful chords. Although prosaic research and experience have so largely divested the character of the Indian of its old romance and made his actual presence a nuisance, nevertheless so long as the memories of our primeval settlements and of our bloody and adventurous frontier traditions shall live, so long will the American Indian be remembered with a sigh as the lost human poetry of the nature wherein he was cradled.

Furthermore, the play was stocked with fresh suggestions and images of nature,—a store-house of those simple metaphors drawn direct from the great objects of the universe, full of a rude pathos and sublimity, and so natural to the genius of Indian chief and orator in their talk. There was a piquance of novelty and a refreshing charm to people—hived in towns and cities, and, stifled with artificial customs, almost oblivious of any direct contact of their senses with the solemn elementary phenomena of the surrounding universe—in hearing Metamora speak, in a voice that echoed and painted them, of the woods, the winds, the sun, the cliffs, the torrents, the lakes, the sea, the stars, the thunder, the meadows and the clouds, the wild animals and the singing birds. The meaning of the words so fitly intoned by the player awoke in the nerves of the audience dim reminiscences of ancestral experiences reverberating out of far ages forgotten long ago, and they were bound by a spell themselves understood not.

And then there was the interest of a style of character and life, of an idealized historic picture of a vanished form of human nature and society, all whose elements stood in strange and fascinating contrast with the personal experience of the beholders. It was the first time the American Indian had ever been dramatized and put on the stage; and this was done in a theme based on one of the romantic episodes of his history embodied in a chieftain of tragic greatness.

In a production of art whose subject and materials lie in the domain of unreclaimed nature, genius is not, indeed, permitted to falsify any fundamental principle or fact, but is free to modify and add. Otherwise, the creative function of art is gone, and only imitation left. In this respect of combined truth and originality, the acted Metamora of Forrest was a wonder never surpassed, in its own kind, in the long story of the stage. He appeared the kingly incarnation of the spirit of the scene, both of the outward landscape and of the taciturn tribe that peopled it with their gliding shapes. He appeared the human lord of the dark wood and the rocky shore, and the natural ruler of their untutored tenants; the soul of the eloquent recital, the noble appeal, and the fiery harangue; the embodiment of a rude magnanimity, a deep domestic love, an unquivering courage and fortitude, an instinctive patriotism and sense of justice, and a relentless revenge. He appeared, too, the votary of a superstition of singular attractiveness, blooming with the native wild-flowers of the human mind, a faith so unaffected and open that it seemed to be read by the stars of the Great Spirit as they looked down on the lone Indian kneeling by the mound of his fathers, the hunted patriot lying in ambush for his foes. Through all this physically-realized, wondrous portraiture of the poetic, the tender, the noble, the awful, the reverential, was mingled the glare of the crouching tiger. It was thus that Forrest in his great creation of Metamora rendered all that there was in the naturalistic poem of Indian life, to all that there was justly adding an infusion of that ideal quality by which art appeals to the nobler feelings of admiration and sympathy in preference to the meaner ones of hate and scorn. In this performance he elaborated a picture of the legendary and historic American Indian which to this day stands alone beyond all rivalry.

Never did an actor more thoroughly identify and merge himself with his part than Forrest did in Metamora. He was completely transformed from what he appeared in other characters, and seemed Indian in every particular, all through and all over, from the crown of his scalp to the sole of his foot. The carriage of his body, the inflections of his voice, his facial expressions, the very pose of his head and neck on his shoulders, were new. For he had recalled all his observations while on his visit with Push-ma-ta-ha among the Choctaws, when he had adopted their habits, eaten their food, slept in their tents, echoed the crack of his rifle over the surface of their lakes, and left the print of his moccasins on their hunting-grounds. He had also patiently studied their characteristics from all other available sources. Accordingly, when he came to impersonate Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags, modelled by the author of the play after that celebrated New England Sachem, the son of Massasoit, known in history as King Philip of Pokanoket, it was the genuine Indian who was brought upon the stage, merely idealized a little in some of his moral features. The attributes unnoticed by careless observers were distinctly shown,—the sudden muscular movements, the repressed emotion, the peculiar mode of breathing, the deep and vigorous gutturals flung out from the muscular base of the abdomen, and the straight or slightly inward-pointing line of the footfall. With a profound truth to fact, the general bearing of Metamora on ordinary occasions was marked by a dull monotony of manner, broken with awkward abruptness, and his grand poses were limited to those times of great excitement when the human organism, if in a state of dynamic surcharge, is spontaneously electrified with heroic lines, and becomes an instrument with which impersonal passions or the laws of nature gesticulate.

With the single and very proper exception of this partially heightened moral refinement, the counterfeit was so cunningly copied that it might have deceived nature herself. Many a time delegations of Indian tribes who chanced to be visiting the cities where he acted this character—Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans—attended the performance, adding a most picturesque feature by their presence, and their pleasure and approval were unqualified. A large delegation of Western Indians, seated in the boxes of the old Tremont Theatre on such an occasion, were so excited by the performance that in the closing scene they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the death of the great chief.

This incident recalls one which happened in the earliest theatre in Philadelphia, when Mrs. Whitelock, the sister of Mrs. Siddons, was playing, and when Washington was present. At the beginning of the performance a group of Indians, who had come from the wilderness to conclude a treaty, made their appearance in the pit in their native costume. The dark, tall, gaunt figures glided in, and, without noticing the audience or seeming to hear the claps of welcome which greeted them, seated themselves, and fixed their eyes on the stage, as unchangingly as if they were petrified. They sat through the chief play like statues, with immovable tranquillity. But in the after-piece an artificial elephant was introduced, which so electrified these sons of the forest that they suddenly sprang up with a cry. They said there had once been a great beast like this in their land. The next day they called on the manager, inspected the mammoth of sticks, pasteboard, and cloth, and asked to see by daylight the heavenly women who had appeared on the stage the previous night.

The opening scene of Metamora was a glen, with ledges of stone, trees, bushes, running vines, and flowers, the leading character seen, in his picturesque, aboriginal costume, standing on the highest rock in an attitude that charmed the eye. Leaning forward on his firmly-planted right foot, the left foot thrown easily back on its tip, he had a bow in his hands, with the arrow sprung to its head. As the arrow sped from the twanging string he raised his eyes with eager gaze after it, gave a deep interjection, "Hah!" bounded upon a rock below, and vanished. In a few moments he re-entered, with his left arm bleeding, as if it had been bitten in a struggle with a wild beast. Oceana, a white maiden, passing, sees his wound and offers him her scarf to bind it up. The mother of Oceana had once befriended Massasoit when he was sick. Metamora, in his gratitude, had visited her grave with offerings for the dead, and, on such an occasion, had rescued Oceana from a panther. He hesitates before accepting, and fills the delay with a by-play of pantomime so true to Indian nature, so new and strange to the spectators, that it was invested with an absorbing interest. At length he says, "Metamora will take the white maiden's gift." He then gives her an eagle's feather, bids her wear it in her hair, and if she is ever in danger he will fly to her rescue at the sight of this pledge of his friendship.

As the play moves on, the audience are gradually borne back to the early days of their fathers, and their dread struggle to establish themselves on these Western shores. We see the thin and thriving settlements constantly augmenting with reinforcements, and pushing the natives before them. We are taken within the homes of the Indians, shown their better qualities, their hopeless efforts, their mixed resolution and misgiving before their coming fate. Our sympathies are enlisted, before we know it, with the defeated party against ourselves; and thus the author and actor won their just victory. For the English are made to represent power and fraud, the Indians truth and patriotism; and when their fugitive king pauses on a lofty cliff in the light of the setting sun, gazes mournfully on the lost hunting-grounds and desecrated graves of his forefathers, and launches his curse on their destroyers, every heart beats with sorrow for him.

The class of speeches in which the instinctive love of nature that unconsciously saturated the Indian soul is expressed, and the closeness of their daily life to the elements of the landscape and the phenomena of the seasons is revealed, were delivered with matchless effect. Metamora, poised like the bronze statue of some god of the antique, says, "I have been upon the high mountain-top when the gray mists were beneath my feet, and the Great Spirit passed by me in wrath. He spoke in anger, and the rocks crumbled beneath the flash of his spear. Then I felt proud and smiled. The white man trembles, but Metamora is not afraid."

And again: "The war and the chase are the red man's brother and sister. The storm-cloud in its fury frights him not; and when the stream is wild and broken his canoe is like a feather, that cannot drown."

Another class of speeches, equally unique in character, and breathing with compressed passion, were those in which the relative positions of the intruding race and the native lords of the soil were described. The style with which these were pronounced made the form of the actor seem a new tenement in which the departed Sachem of the Pequots lived and spoke again. "Your lands?" he exclaims, with sarcastic disdain. "They are mine. Climb upon the rock and look to the sunrise and to the sunset,—all that you see is the land of the Wampanoags, the land of Metamora. I am the white man's friend; but when my friendship is over I will not ask the white man if I have the right to be his foe. Metamora will love and hate, smoke the pipe of peace or draw the hatchet of battle, as seems good to him. He will not wrong his white brother, but he owns no master save Manito, Master of Heaven."

And at another time: "The pale-faces are around me thicker than the leaves of summer. I chase the hart in the hunting-grounds; he leads me to the white man's village. I drive my canoe into the rivers; they are full of the white man's ships. I visit the graves of my fathers; they are lost in the white man's corn-fields. They come like the waves of the ocean forever rolling upon the shores. Surge after surge, they dash upon the beach, and every foam-drop is a white man. They swarm over the land like the doves of winter, and the red men are dropping like withered leaves."

In these passages his declamation seemed to make the whole tragedy of the story of the American Indians breathe and swell and tremble.

A wonderful interest, too, was concentrated in the personal traits of Metamora himself as an individual; so true to his word, so faithful to his friend, so devoted to his wife and child, so proud of his land and his fathers, so fearless of his foe, so reverential before his God. "To his friend Metamora is like the willow,—he bends ever at the breath of those that love him. To others he is an oak. Until with your single arm you can rive the strongest tree of the forest from its earth, think not to stir Metamora when his heart says No."

In the earliest scene with his wife, when ready to start on a hunt, he lingered, and directed her to take her child from its couch on the earth. He then lifted it in his hands, and stood for several seconds in an attitude so superbly defined in its outlines of strength and grace that several pictures of it were published at the time. He asked, with a look of fondness, suppressing his stern reserve, "Dost thou not love this little one, Nahmeokee?" "Ah, yes!" she replied. He then continued, in a caressing murmur like the runneling music of a brook, "When first his little eyes unclosed, thou saidst that they were like to mine." The expression of human love was so simple and complete, and so exquisitely set in the wild seclusion of nature, suggestive of the self-sufficingness of this little nest of affection embosomed in the wood and forgetful of all else in the world, that it made many a soft heart beat fast with an aching wish that stayed long after the scene was gone.

In a later scene he describes to his wife a vision he has had in the night. He relates it in a rich, subdued undertone, waxing intenser, and giving the hearer a mixed feeling of mysterious reverie and prophetic inspiration. "Nahmeokee, the power of dreams has been on me, and the shadows of things to be have passed before me. My heart is big with great thoughts. When I sleep, I think the knife is red in my hand and the scalp of the white man is streaming." Here he gave an additional height to his figure, a slight downward inclination to his head and eyes, dropped his left arm listlessly, and, while the two halves of his whole form were seen finely distinguished along the median line, with his right hand, extended to its fullest distance straight from the shoulder, grasped his bow, which stood perfectly erect from the ground. It was a posture of beautiful artistic precision and meaning, expressive of reflection with a quality of earnest listening in it, as if waiting for a reply. The words of Nahmeokee, not fitting his mood, slightly ruffled his temper, and then, with a crisp tone of voice which in its change of quality and accent was so unexpected that it was like a sudden sweep of the wind that rustles the dry leaves and hums through the wood, he said, "Yes, when our fires are no longer red in the high places of our fathers,—when the bones of our kindred make fruitful the fields the stranger has planted amid the ashes of our wigwams,—when we are hunted back like the wounded elk far towards the going down of the sun,—our hatchets broken, our bows unstrung, and our war-whoops hushed,—then will the stranger spare; for we shall be too small for his eye to see!"

The controversy between the natives and the new settlers having reached a perilous height, the latter dispatch a messenger asking Metamora to meet them in council. Very angry, and deeming all talk useless, he yet concludes to go. Unannounced, abruptly, he makes his peremptory appearance amidst them. Settling strongly back on his right leg, his left advanced at ease with bent knee, his right side half presented, his face turned squarely towards them, he says, with Spartan curtness, and in a manner not insolent, and yet indescribably defiant, "You sent for me, and I have come." His action was so wonderfully expressive in speaking these few words that they became a popular phrase, circulating in the mouths of men in all parts of the country.

The same result also followed in another and simpler scene. He had promised to meet the English at a certain time and place. They demanded of him, "Will you come?" By mere force of manner he gave an immense impressiveness to the simple reply, "Metamora cannot lie." The very boys in the streets were seen trying to imitate his posture and look, swelling their little throats to make the words sound big, as they repeated, "Metamora cannot lie."

In an interview with the English, after deadly hostilities have begun to rage, Aganemo, a subject of Metamora, who, for some supposed wrong, has turned against him, is called in, and bears testimony against his chief and his tribe. Metamora cries, "Let me see his eyes;" and, going close in front of him, addresses the cowering recreant: "Look me in the face, Aganemo. Thou turnest away. The spirit of a dog has entered thee, and thou crouchest. Dost thou come here with a lie in thy heart to witness against me? Thine eye cannot rest on thy chieftain. White men, can he speak words of truth who has been false to his nation and false to his friends?" Fitz Arnold says, "Send him hence." Metamora interposes with an imperial mien full of dread import, "I will do that," and strikes him dead on the spot, exclaiming, "Slave of the whites, follow Sassamon,"—Sassamon being the name of another traitor whom he had previously slain in the midst of his own braves.

Fitz Arnold orders his men to seize the high-handed executioner of their witness. Towering alone in solitary and solid grandeur, with accents and gestures whose impassioned sincerity painted every thought as a visible reality and made the excited audience lean out of their seats, Metamora hurled back his electric defiance:

"Come! my knife has drunk the blood of the traitor, but it is not satisfied. Men of the pale race, beware! The mighty spirits of the Wampanoags are hovering over your heads. They stretch their shadowy arms and call for vengeance. They shall have it. Tremble! From East to West, from the South to the North, the tribes have roused from their slumbers. They grasp the hatchet. The pale-faces shall wither under their power. White men. Metamora is your foe!"

The soldiers level their guns at him. He suddenly seizes a white man and places him before himself. The living shield thus extemporized falls, perforated with bullets. Metamora hurls his tomahawk to the floor, where it sticks quivering, while he cries, "Thus do I defy your power!" and darts away, leaving them dumb with astonishment.

The pathos with which Forrest rendered portions of the play of Metamora was one of its most remarkable excellences and one of his most distinctive trophies as a dramatic artist. No theory of the passions or mere mechanical drill in their expression can ever teach a man to be pathetic. Only a disagreeable mockery of it can thus come. Pathos is the one particular affection that knows no deceit, but comes in truth direct from the soul and goes direct to the soul. It may lie dormant in us, as music lies in the strings of a silent harp, till a touch gives it life. Speaking more or less in all, it speaks most in those who cherish it most; and when it speaks it is felt by all,—red man and white man, barbarian and philosopher. The pathos of Metamora was not like that of Damon when he parted with his family to go to his execution, not like that of Brutus when he sentenced his son to death, not like that of Virginius when he slew his daughter. It was a pathos without tears or gesture. The Indian warrior never weeps. It was almost solely a pathos of the voice, and was as broad and primitive as the unperverted faith and affection of man. The supreme example of this quality in the play was finely set off by the contrast that immediately foreran it, its soft, sad shades following a scene of lurid fury and grandeur.

A peace-runner brings Metamora the news that Nahmeokee is a captive in the power of his enemies. Leaving fifty white men bound as hostages to secure his own safety, he starts alone to deliver her. As he approaches the English camp, he hears Nahmeokee shriek. With one bound he bursts in upon them, levels his gun, and thunders,—

"Which of you has lived too long? Dogs of white men, do you lift your hands against a woman?" "Seize him!" they cry, but shrink from his movement. "Hah!" he scornfully exclaims, "it is now a warrior who stands before you, the fire-weapon in his hands. Who, then, shall seize him? Go, Nahmeokee; I will follow thee." Then, reminding them of his hostages, he turns on his heel and departs.

He is next discovered, with a slow and heavy step, approaching his wigwam, where his rescued wife waits to receive him. He has seen that the too unequal struggle of his countrymen is hopeless, and he appears sad and gloomy. Telling Nahmeokee, who looks broken with grief, that he is weary with the strife of blood, he says, "Bring me thy little one, that I may press him to my burning heart to quiet its tumult." Without his knowledge, the child had been killed by the white men a few hours previous. The mother goes where the child is lying upon the ground, lifts the skin that covers him, points at him, and drops her head in tears. Metamora looks at the child, at the mother, stoops, and, with rapid motions, feels the little face, arms, and legs. Suppressing the start of horror and the cry of grief a white man would have given, he sinks his chin slowly upon his breast and heaves a deep sigh, and then utters the simple words, "Dead! cold!" in a tone low as if to be heard by himself alone, and sounding like the wail of a sorrow in some far-away world. Having lifted the dead child and fondled it in his bosom and laid it tenderly back, he walks slowly to the weeping Nahmeokee, places his hand on her shoulder, and says, in a soft voice quivering with the tears not suffered to mount in the eyes, "Well, is he not happy? Better that he should die by the stranger's hand than live to be his slave. Do not bow down thy head. Thou wilt see him again in the happy land of the spirits; and he will look smilingly as—as—as I do now." Here the quality of smilingness was in the tones of the voice only, while his face wore the impress of intense grief. The voice and face thus contradicting each other presented a pathos so overwhelming that it seemed as if nothing human could surpass it or resist it.

His manner now changes. Some great resolution seems to have arisen in him. His words have a tender yet ominous meaning in their inflection as he asks Nahmeokee, "Do you not fear the power of the white man? He might seize thee and bear thee off to his far country, bind those arms that have so often clasped me, and make thee his slave. We cannot fly: our foes are all about us. We cannot fight, for this [drawing his long knife] is the only weapon I have saved unbroken from the strife. It has tasted the white man's blood and reached the cold heart of the traitor. It has been our best friend, and it is now our only treasure." Here he drew her still closer, and placed her head on his bosom, and, with the long knife in his hand, pointed upwards, and with an alluring, indescribably sweet and aerial falsetto tone, painted a picture that seemed to take form and color in the very atmosphere. There was a weird dreaminess in his voice and a visionary abstractness in his gaze, as with the words "long path in the thin air," he indicated the heavenward journey of his dead child, that seemed actually to dissolve the whole scene, theatre, actor, spectators, and all, into a passing vapor, an ethereal enchantment.

"I look through the long path in the thin air, and think I see our little one borne to the land of the happy, where the fair hunting-grounds never know snows or storms, and where the immortal brave feast under the eyes of the Giver of Good. Look upward, Nahmeokee! See, thy child looks back to thee, and beckons thee to follow." Drawing her closer with his left arm, and lowering his right, he whispers, "Hark! In the distant wood I faintly hear the tread of the white men. They are upon us! The home of the happy is made ready for thee!" While this picture of fear and hope is vivid before her mind, he strikes the blow, and in an instant she is dead in his arms. He clasps her to his breast, presses his lips on her forehead, and gently places her beside the dead child. He then shudders, and draws forth the knife sheathed in her side, and kisses its blade in a sudden transport, exclaiming, "She knew no bondage to the white men. Pure as the snow she lived, free as the air she died!"

At this moment the hills are covered with the white men, pointing their rifles at his heart. "Hah!" he cries. Their leader shouts, "Metamora is our prisoner!" "No," he proudly responds, dilating with the haughtiest port of defiance. "I live, the last of my race, live to defy you still, though numbers and treachery overpower me. Come to me, come singly, come all, and this knife, which has drunk the foul blood of your nation, and is now red with the purest of mine, will feel a grasp as strong as when it flashed in the glare of your burning dwellings or was lifted terribly over the fallen in battle."

The order is given to fire upon him; and he replies, "Do so. I am weary of the world; for ye are dwellers in it. I would not turn on my heel to save my life." They shoot, and he staggers, but in his dying agonies launches on them his awful malediction:

"My curses on ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in his war-voice from the clouds! May his words be like the forked lightnings, to blast and desolate! May the loud winds and the fierce red flames be loosed in vengeance upon ye, tigers! May the angry Spirit of the Waters in his wrath sweep over your dwellings! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path where the red man shall tread, and may the wolf and the panther howl over your fleshless bones! I go. My fathers beckon from the green lakes and the broad hills. The Great Spirit calls me. I go,—but the curses of Metamora stay with the white men!"

He crawls painfully to the bodies of his wife and child, and, in a vain effort to kiss them, expires, with his last gasp mixing the words, "I die—my wife, my queen—my Nahmeokee!"

SPARTACUS.