“At the first appearance of the Europeans, her young heart was impressed with admiration of the persons and manners of the strangers. But it is not during their prosperity that she displays her attachment. She is not influenced by awe of their greatness, or fear of their resentment, in the assistance she affords them. It was during their severest distresses, when their most celebrated chief was a captive in their hands, and was dragged through the country, as a spectacle for the sport and derision of her people, that she places herself between them and destruction.
“The spectacle of Pocahontas in an attitude of entreaty, with her hair loose, and her eyes streaming with tears, supplicating her enraged father for the life of Captain Smith, when he is about to crush the head of his prostrate victim with a club, is a situation equal to the genius of Raphael. And when the royal savage directs his ferocious glance for a moment from his victim, to reprove his weeping daughter; when, softened by her distress, his eye loses its fierceness, and he gives his captive to her tears, the painter will discover a new occasion for exercising his talents.
“In Pocahontas we have to admire, not the softer virtues only; she is found, when the interest of her friends demands it, full of foresight and intrepidity.
“When a conspiracy is planned for the extermination of the English, she eludes the jealous vigilance of her father, and ventures at midnight, through a thousand perils, to apprise them of their danger.
“But in no situation does she appear to more advantage, than when, disgusted with the cold formalities of a court (in England) and the impertinent and troublesome curiosity of the people, she addressed the feeling and pathetic remonstrance to Captain Smith on the distant coldness of his manner. Briefly she stated the rise and progress of their friendship; modestly she pointed out the services she had rendered him; concluding with an affecting picture of her situation, at a distance from her country and family, and surrounded by strangers in a strange land.
“Indeed there is ground for apprehension that posterity, in reading this part of American history, will be inclined to consider the story of Pocahontas as an interesting romance; perhaps recalling the palpable fictions of early travellers and navigators, they may suppose that in those times a portion of fiction was deemed essential to the embellishment of history. It is not even improbable, that considering every thing relating to Captain Smith and Pocahontas as a mere fiction, they may vent their spleen against the historian for impairing the interest of his plot by marrying the princess of Powhatan to a Mr. Rolf, of whom nothing had previously been said, in defiance of all the expectations raised by the foregoing parts of the fable.
“It is the last sad office of history to record the fate of this incomparable woman. The severe muse, which presides over this department, cannot plant the cypress over her grave, and consign her to the tomb, with the stately pomp and graceful tears of poetry. She cannot with pious sorrow inurn the ashes and immortalize the virtues of the dead by the soul-piercing elegy, which fancy, mysterious deity, pours out, wild and plaintive, her hair loose, and her white bosom throbbing with anguish. Those things are placed equally beyond her reach and her inclination. But history affects not to conceal her sorrow on this occasion.
“She died at Gravesend, (England,) where she was preparing to embark with her husband and son on her return to Virginia. Her death was a happy mixture of Indian fortitude and Christian submission, affecting all those who saw her, by the lively and edifying picture of piety and virtue which marked her latter moments.”—Burk’s Virginia.
[[NOTE 25—CANTO SIXTH, SECT. IX.]]
And now this land is ours again;
The rest of the pale-face crew
We’ll brush away from our forest home,
As we brush the drops of dew.