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."