Now, it is this simple acceptation of death as a natural thing that I would have the white race learn. And yet it can never come to us as an act of simple faith as it is with the Indian. Our civilization has spoiled us for “simple faith.” That is practically impossible, save to a few souls who, unlike the rest of us, have “kept themselves unspotted from the world” of speculative thought, or theological dogma. It can come (and does with many) as the result of religious training, or as it did to Browning and Whitman. What wonderfully different minds these two men had. One an aristocrat, the other a democrat, yet both full of love for mankind, and each teaching with vigor and power the Fatherhood of God, the real brotherhood of man, and the immortality of the soul. Read Browning’s _Prospice_, part of which I have already quoted, _Evelyn Hope_, _Abt Vogler_, and these three stanzas with which he opens his _La Saziaz_, and elsewhere calls a _Pisgah Sight_: “Good, to forgive: Best, to forget! Living we fret; Dying, we live. Fretless and free, Soul, clap thy pinion! Earth have dominion, Body, o’er thee! Wander at will, Day after day,-- Wander away, Wandering still-- Soul that canst soar! Body may slumber: Body shall cumber Soul-flight no more. Waft of soul’s wing! What lies above? Sunshine and Love, Sky blue and Spring! Body hides--where? Ferns of all feather, Mosses and heather, Yours be the care!” Compare these utterances with Whitman’s rugged and forceful words: “Passive and faltering, The words, _the Dead_, I write, For living are the Dead, (Haply the only living, only real, And I, the apparition, the spectre.)” Again, in his _To One Shortly to Die_, what a triumphant note is in the last two lines: “I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated, I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.” How perfectly Indian, this attitude, this refusal to be sorry, and to offer congratulations rather than regrets. In his _Night on the Prairies_ his perfect assurance as to the future is clearly expressed, and while measuring himself with the great thoughts of space and eternity that fill him as he gazes upon the myriads of globes above, he exclaims: “Now I absorb immortality and peace, I admire death.... O, I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.” In one poem he speaks of “awaiting death with perfect equanimity,” and in another says: “Thee, holiest minister of Heaven--thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all, Rich, florid loosener of the stricture knot call’d life, Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.” And the reason for all this restfulness as to Death and the Future is expressed in his Assurances: