The thought of death sits easy on the man, Who hath been bred, and dies among the mountains, to say, The thought of death sits easy on the man, Whose earnest _will_ hath lived among the deathless. And I can perhaps build upon this foundation an answer to the question, which would deeply interest me, by whomever put, and pained me only because it was put by _you_; _i.e._ because I feared it might be the inspiration of ill health, and am jealous of any _consenting_ of that inward will which, with some mysterious germination, moves in the Bethesda pool of our animal life, to withdraw its resistance. For the soul, among its other regalia, has an energetic veto against all undermining of the constitution, and among these, as not the least insidious, I consider the thoughts and hauntings that tamper with the love of life. Do not so! you _would not_, if I could transfer into you, in all its depth and liveliness, the sense what a hope, promise, impulse, you are to me in my present efforts to realise my past labours; and by building up the temple,--the shaped stones, beams, pillars, yea, the graven ornaments and the connecting clamps of which have been piled up by me, only in too great abundance,--to enable you and my two (may I not say other) sons to affirm,--_Vivit, quia non frustra vixit._ In reading an extract in the German Encyclopædia from Dobrizhoffer's most interesting account of the Abiponenses, a savage tribe in Paraguay, houseless, yet in person and in morals the noblest of savage tribes; who, when first known by Europeans, amounted to 100,000 warriors, yet have a tradition that they were but the relic of a far more numerous community, and who by wars with other savage tribes, and by intestine feuds among themselves, are now dwindled to a thousand (men, women, and children do not exceed five thousand), it struck me with distinct remembrance--first, that this is the history of _all_ savages tribes; and, second, that all tribes _are_ savage that have not a positive religion defecated from witchcraft, and an established priesthood contra-distinguished from individual conjurers. Nay, the islands of the Pacific (the Polynesia, which sooner or later the swift and silent masonry of the coral worms will compact into a rival continent, into a _fifth quarter_ of the world), blest with all the plenties of nature, and enjoying an immunity from all the ordinary dangers of savage life, were many of them utterly dispeopled since their first discovery, and wholly by their own feuds and vices; nay, that their bread-fruit tree and their delicious and healthful climate had only made the process of mutual destruction and self-destruction more hateful, more basely sensual. This, therefore, I assume as an undoubted fact of history; and from this, as a portion of the history of _men_, I draw a new (to my knowledge, at least, a new) series of proofs of several, I _might_ say