And yet it is my comfort to remember that ancestors of mine, who conquered the new world, married with Indian women. From that blood in my veins I have the pinched forehead of an Indian, the happy poverty, the shiftless lassitude, which mocks at the laboring white man.
Do you suppose the Indian venerates a religion worn on Sundays only?
Do you imagine he respects the laws—a spider's web to catch the flies and let the hawk go free?
The white man's only ambition is to have; his years are spent in a fussy aimless selfishness, for which he forsakes the dignity of manhood, and being too busy, he has no time to live.
The Indian's holy ideal is to be, to learn from nature the upward way toward God.
The Indian sees the white man self-made, self-conscious, self-centered, self-sufficient, self-opinionated—all and entirely self. For this poor prisoner within the bars of self the windows of the soul have all been darkened, so that he can not see, or hear, or scent, or taste, or feel the world he lives in, Heaven's fairest province. Blinded and deafened, dulled, a groping creature, he is a specter haunting Paradise, waiting for death to reveal the glories which life has offered.
Just at the last, before I said "Adios" to the world, I saw a little of the United States, something of England, and of my native Spain. I saw Spain, the land of the past, England, the land of the present, America, the land of the future. In America, I witnessed the rise of nations, in England, the poise at the zenith, in Spain, the fall. It was like a coast, the very coast of time, with the rushing onset, the tumultuous crash, and piteous dragging ebb of rising, breaking, dying empires. They come, they have, they fall, passing away, and are not.
From all that I rode away, leaving the storm of nations to rage and break on pitiless coasts of time.
"Leave all that you have, and rise, and follow me."
Having is only a shadow which flies away at sundown.