Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/223

Rh he began the overland journey northward through Virginia; he crossed the River Susquehanna on the ice, "next morning sat forward again towards Philadelphia," and in two days more arrived at his father's house on the banks of the River Schuylkill, having been absent nearly five years.

Though collecting as a botanist and observing as an ornithologist, Bartram thus far has mainly been occupied with the Indians. In Part IV he discusses their persons, character, and qualifications, noting that they have the "most perfect human figure,” their government and civil society, their dress and amusements, property and occupations, marriage and funeral rites, and their language and monuments. The ready pencil of the naturalist provided the engraver with drawings of botanical and zoological subjects throughout the volume. The frontispiece represents "Mico Chlucco the Long Warrior, or King of the Siminoles," whose dancing crest of splendid feathers flashes again in Wordsworth's Ruth.

A bare survey does scant justice to the richness of form and colour in Bartram's pages. At one time he is struck with "the tall aspiring Gordonia lasianthus." "Its thick foliage, of a dark green colour, is flowered over with large milk-white fragrant blossoms, on long slender elastic peduncles, at the extremities of its numerous branches, from the bosom of the leaves, and renewed every morning"—the "budding, fading, faded flowers" of Ruth. Or again we see the solitary dejected “wood-pelican," alone on the topmost limb of a dead cypress; “it looks extremely grave, sorrowful, and melancholy, as if in the deepest thought"—an image used by Wordsworth in Book Third of The Prelude. Of the "Alatamaha" Bartram says: "I ascended this beautiful river, on whose fruitful banks the generous and true sons of liberty securely dwell, fifty miles above the white settlements." Allured by the "sublime enchanting scenes of primitive nature," and by "visions of terrestrial happiness," he wandered away to a grove at the edge of a luxuriant savannah:

How happily situated is tihis retired spot of earth! What an elysium it is! where the wandering Siminole, the naked red warrior, roams at large, and after the vigorous chase retires from the scorching heat of the meridian sun. Here he reclines and reposes under the