We, therefore, rejoiced that “Wakondah” was not a topic we were called upon to discuss. But the poem is republished, and placed upon our table, and these very “circumstances of position,” which restrained us in the first place, render it a positive duty that we speak distinctly in the second. And very distinctly shall we speak. In fact this effusion is a dilemma whose horns _goad_ us into frankness and candor—“_c’est un malheur_,” to use the words of Victor Hugo, “_d’où on ne pourrait se tirer par des periphrases, par des quemadmodums et des verumenimveros_.” If we mention it at all, we are _forced_ to employ the language of that region where, as Addison has it, “they sell the best fish and speak the plainest English.” “Wakondah,” then, from beginning to end, is trash. With the trivial exceptions which we shall designate, it has _no_ merit whatever; while its faults, more numerous than the leaves of Valombrosa, are of that rampant class which, if any schoolboy _could_ be found so uninformed as to commit them, any schoolboy should be remorselessly flogged for committing. The story, or as the epics have it, the argument, although brief, is by no means particularly easy of comprehension. The design seems to be based upon a passage in Mr. Irving’s “Astoria.” He tells us that the Indians who inhabit the Chippewyan range of mountains, call it the “Crest of the World,” and “think that Wakondah, or the Master of Life, as they designate the Supreme Being, has his residence among these aerial heights.” Upon this hint Mr. Mathews has proceeded. He introduces us to Wakondah standing in person upon a mountain-top. He describes his appearance, and thinks that a Chinook would be frightened to behold it. He causes the “Master of Life” to make a speech, which is addressed, generally, to things at large, and particularly to the neighboring Woods, Cataracts, Rivers, Pinnacles, Steeps, and Lakes—not to mention an Earthquake. But all these (and we think, judiciously) turn a deaf ear to the oration, which, to be plain, is scarcely equal to a second-rate Piankitank stump speech. In fact, it is a bare-faced attempt at animal magnetism, and the mountains, &c., do no more than show its potency in resigning themselves to sleep, as they do. Then shone Wakondah’s dreadful eyes —then he becomes _very_ indignant, and accordingly launches forth into speech the second—with which the delinquents are afflicted, with occasional brief interruptions from the poet, in proper person, until the conclusion of the poem. The _subject_ of the two orations we shall be permitted to sum up compendiously in the one term “rigmarole.” But we do not mean to say that our compendium is not an improvement, and a very considerable one, upon the speeches themselves,—which, taken altogether, are the queerest, and the most rhetorical, not to say the most miscellaneous orations we ever remember to have listened to outside of an Arkansas House of Delegates.