Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/334

Rh how they by that means are able to make any progress, incomprehensible how they can have any satisfaction in so doing. But a light, stronger, mightier, than that of these circumscribed doctrines, must proceed from the Word of Christ, to the heart of the heathen, and attract it to His cross and His crown, from the hunting-grounds and the wild dances of earth to His heaven. I cannot believe otherwise.

It is evening, and the bright glow of fires lights up the western heaven, as it has done every evening since I came here. It is the glow of the Indian prairie fires which they kindle to compel the deer to assemble at certain points, as it is now their hunting season. In this manner they take a vast number of deer, but at the same time destroy the chase, and by that means occasion still greater want, or are compelled to go still farther westward into the wilderness.

But the West is brilliant, and all the saints—St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Charles, a settlement still higher up, St. Anthony, who is beginning to build a city—who have taken up their abode on the northern Mississippi, and who now are lit up by the fires of the Indians, will give a new dawn to the wilderness and a new light to life.

The West is brilliant from the burning prairies, from the wild chase. I love that glow, because it has a poetical splendour; it shines over the moon-dances, and the councils, and the feasts of the spirits. But it is, after all, rather brightness than light.

When homes such as those of Andrew Downing and Marcus S., and of my good friend Mrs. W. H., which is almost a Swedish home, stand upon the heights of the Mississippi and St. Peter; when church spires shine out and scalp-dances are no longer danced there; when voices such as those of Channing, and Emerson, and Beecher, and Bellows, lift themselves in the councils, and when Lucretia Motts speak there also for freedom, peace