His very physiognomy prognosticated what soul was encased within the spare but well-ribbed form which had that "lean and hungry look" described by England's greatest bard as bespeaking little sleep of nights, but much of ambition, self-reliance, and impatience of control. His lip and eye denoted the man of unyielding temper, and his very hair, slightly silvered, stood erect like quills round his wrinkled brow, as if they scorned to bend. Some sneered, it is true, at what they called a military tyro, at the impromptu general who had sprung out of the uncouth lawyer and the unlearned judge, who in arms had only the experience of a few months, acquired in a desultory war against wild Indians, and who was, not only without any previous training to his new profession, but also without the first rudiments of a liberal education, for he did not even know the orthography of his own native language. Such was the man who, with a handful of raw militia, was to stand in the way of the veteran troops of England, whose boast it was to have triumphed over one of the greatest captains known in history. But those who entertained such distrust had hardly come in contact with General Jackson, when they felt that they had to deal with a master-spirit. True, he was rough hewn from the rock, but rock he was, and of that kind of rock which Providence chooses to select as a fit material to use in its structures of human greatness. True, he had not the education of a lieutenant in a European army; but what lieutenant, educated or not, who had the will and the remarkable military adaptation so evident in General Jackson's intellectual and physical organization, ever remained a subaltern? Much less could General Jackson fail to rise to his proper place in a country where there was so much more elbow-room, and fewer artificial obstacles than in less favored lands. But, whatever those obstacles might have been, General Jackson would have overcome them all. His will was of such an extraordinary nature that, like Christian faith, it could almost have accomplished prodigies and removed mountains. It is impossible to study the life of General Jackson without being convinced that this is the most remarkable feature of his character. His will had, as it were, the force and the fixity of fate; that will carried him triumphantly through his military and civil career, and through the difficulties of private life. So intense and incessantly active this peculiar faculty was in him, that one would suppose that his mind was nothing but will—a will so lofty that it towered into sublimity. In him it supplied the place of genius—or, rather, it was almost genius. On many occasions, in the course of his long, eventful life, when his shattered constitution made his physicians despair of preserving him, he seemed to continue to live merely because it was his will; and when his unconquerable spirit departed from his enfeebled and worn-out body, those who knew him well might almost have been tempted to suppose that he had not been vanquished by death, but had at last consented to repose. This man, when he took the command at New Orleans, had made up his mind to beat the English; and, as that mind was so constituted that it was not susceptible of entertaining much doubt as to the results of any of its resolves, he went to work with an innate confidence which transfused itself into the population he had been sent to protect.

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=Brantz Mayer, 1809-.= (Manual, p. 490.)

From "Mexico, Aztec," &c.

=136.= REKINDLING THE SACRED FIRE.

At the end of the Aztec or Toltec cycle of fifty-two years,—for it is not accurately ascertained to which of the tribes the astronomical science of Tenochtitlan is to be attributed,—these primitive children of the New World believed that the world was in danger of instant destruction. Accordingly, its termination became one of their most serious and awful epochs, and they anxiously awaited the moment when the sun would be blotted out from the heavens, and the globe itself resolved once more into chaos. As the cycle ended in the winter, the season of the year, with its drearier sky and colder air, in the lofty regions of the valley, added to the gloom that fell upon the hearts of the people. On the last day of the fifty-two years, all the fires in temples and dwellings were extinguished, and the natives devoted themselves to fasting and prayer. They destroyed alike their valuable and worthless wares; rent their garments, put out their lights, and hid themselves for awhile in solitude….

At dark on the last dread evening,—as soon as the sun had set, as they imagined, forever,—a sad and solemn procession of priests and people marched forth from the city to a neighboring hill, to rekindle the "New Fire." This mournful march was called "the procession of the gods," and was supposed to be their final departure from their temples and altars.

As soon as the melancholy array reached the summit of the hill, it reposed in fearful anxiety until the Pleiades reached the zenith in the sky, whereupon the priests immediately began the sacrifice of a human victim, whose breast was covered with a wooden shield, which the chief flamen kindled by friction. When the sufferer received the fatal stab from the sacrificial knife of obsidian, the machine was set in motion on his bosom until the blaze had kindled. The anxious crowd stood round with fear and trembling. Silence reigned over nature and man. Not a word was uttered among the countless multitude that thronged the hill-sides and plains, whilst the priest performed his direful duty to the gods. At length, as the fire sparks gleamed faintly from the whirling instrument, low sobs and ejaculations were whispered among the eager masses. As the sparks kindled into a blaze, and the blaze into a flame, and the flaming shield and victim were cast together on a pile of combustibles which burst at once into the brightness of a conflagration, the air was rent with the joyous shouts of the relieved and panic-stricken Indians. Far and wide over the dusky crowds beamed the blaze like a star of promise. Myriads of upturned faces greeted it from hills, mountains, temples, terraces, teocallis, house-tops, and city walls; and the prostrate multitudes hailed the emblem of light, life, and fruition, as a blessed omen of the restored favor of their gods, and the preservation of their race for another cycle. At regular intervals, Indian couriers held aloft brands of resinous wood, by which they transmitted the "New Fire" from hand to hand, from village to village, and town to town, throughout the Aztec empire. Light was radiated from the imperial or ecclesiastical center of the realm. In every temple and dwelling it was rekindled from the sacred source; and when the sun rose again on the following morning, the solemn procession of priests, princes, and subjects, which had taken up its march from the capital on the preceding night with solemn steps, returned once more to the abandoned capital, and, restoring the gods to their altars, abandoned themselves to joy and festivity, in token of gratitude and relief from impending doom.

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=Albert James Pickett,[41] 1858-.= (Manual, p. 490.)