But an argument on this subject, would not be worth ink and paper; and I am, moreover, aware, that this reasoning may be abused. _Any_ attempt to construe the purposes of Deity must be liable to the same misapplication. And, besides, it is not my design to go so far back; I seek not so much to excuse as to account for--less to justify than to analyze--the characteristics of the class before me. I wish to establish that the pioneer hatred of the Indian was not an unprovoked or groundless hatred, that the severity of his warfare was not a mere gratuitous and bloody-minded cruelty. There are a thousand actions, of which we are hearing every day, that are indefensible in morals: and yet we are conscious while we condemn the actors, that, in like circumstances, we could not have acted differently. So is it with the fierce and violent reprisals, sometimes made by frontier rangers. Their best defence lies in the statement that they were men, and that their manhood prompted them to vengeance. When they deemed themselves injured, they demanded reparation, in such sort as that demand could then be made--at the muzzle of a rifle or the point of a knife. They were equal to the times in which they lived.--Had they not been so, how many steamboats would now be floating on the Mississippi? There was no romance in the composition of the pioneer--whatever there may have been in his environment. His life was altogether too serious a matter for poetry, and the only music he took pleasure in, was the sound of a violin, sending forth notes remarkable only for their liveliness. Even this, he could enjoy but at rare periods, when his cares were forcibly dismissed. He was, in truth, a very matter-of-fact sort of person. It was principally with facts that he had to deal--and most of them were very "stubborn facts." Indeed, it may be doubted--notwithstanding much good poetry has been written (in cities chiefly), on solitude and the wilderness--whether a life in the woods is, after all, very suggestive of poetical thoughts. The perils of the frontier must borrow most of their "enchantment" from the "distance;" and its sufferings and hardships are certainly more likely to evoke pleasant fancies to him who sits beside a good coal fire, than to one whose lot it is to bear them. Even the (so-called) "varied imagery" of the Indian's eloquence--about which so much nonsense has been written--is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. An Indian, as we have said before, has no humor--he never understands a jest--his wife is a beast of burthen--heaven is a hunting-ground--his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, or sentiments. And yet he lives in the wilderness all the days of his life! The only trait he has, in common with the poetical character, is his laziness.