While this feeling continues, we shall not look to him for poetry; and the only imaginative writing in which he is likely to be generally used as material, will be kindred to that known by the appropriate title of "Pirate Literature." Mr.Cooper and Miss Sedgwick are, perhaps, alone among our writers in their attempts to do the Indian justice, while making him the poetical machine in fiction.
Missionaries, however, as well as others who have lived among the aborigines for purely benevolent purposes, have discovered in them capabilities and docility which may put to the blush many of the whites who despise and hate them.

Not only in individual cases, but in more extended instances, the Indian has been found susceptible of religious and moral instruction; his heart has warmed to kindness, like any other man's; he has been able to perceive the benefits of regular industry; his head has proved as clear in the apprehension of the distinction between right and wrong as that of the more highly cultivated moralist; and he receives the fundamental truths of the gospel with an avidity, and applies them--at least to the lives and characters of his neighbors--with a keenness, which show him to be not far behind the rest of mankind in sensibility and acuteness.

Without referring to the testimony of the elder missionaries, which is abundant, I remember a most touching account, by Rev.George Duffield, jr., of piety in an Indian wigwam, which I would gladly transfer to these pages did their limits admit.

It could be proved by overwhelming testimony, that the Indian is as susceptible of good as his white brother.

But it is not necessary in this place to urge his claim to our attention on the ground of his moral and religious capabilities.