of the Indians,” Carver’s book of _Travels_ is of unsurpassed value. Besides its worth for instruction, is its worth for delight; we have no other “Indian book” more captivating than this. Here is the charm of a sincere, powerful, and gentle personality--the charm of novel and significant facts, of noble ideas, of humane sentiments, all uttered in English well-ordered and pure. In evidence, also, of the European celebrity acquired by his book, may be cited the fact that it seems to have had a strong fascination for Schiller, as, indeed, might have been expected; and Carver’s report of a harangue by a Nadowessian chief over the dead body of one of their great warriors--being itself a piece of true poetry in prose--was turned into verse by the German poet, and became famous as his _Nadowessiers Totenlied_,--a dirge which pleased Goethe so much that he declared it to be among the best of Schiller’s poems in that vein, and wished that his friend had written a dozen such.[2] _St. John Crèvecœur_.--In 1782, there was published in London an American book written with a sweetness of tone and, likewise, with a literary grace and a power of fascination then quite unexpected from the western side of the Atlantic. It presented itself to the public behind this ample title-page:--“Letters from an American Farmer, describing certain provincial situations, manners, and customs, not generally known, and conveying some idea of the late and present interior circumstances of the British Colonies in North America: written for the information of a friend in England, by J. Hector St. John, a farmer in Pennsylvania.” The name of the author as thus given upon his title-page, was not his name in full, but only the baptismal portion of it. By omitting from the book his surname, which was Crèvecœur, he had chosen to disguise to the English public the fact--which could hardly have added to his welcome among them--that though he was an American, he was not an English American, but a French one,--having been born in Normandy, and of a noble family there, in 1731. While really an American farmer, Crèvecœur was a man of education, of refinement, of varied experience in the world. When but a lad of sixteen, he had removed from France to England; when but twenty-three, he had emigrated to America.