Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/163

Rh he can reach a sight of the salt ocean, the sight exhilarates him, and the odor of the dank kelp invigorates him. Aptly has it been said, — “Man is one world, and hath another to attend him.” There is a sympathy and a responsive relation between the senses and the mind of a wild man and the aspects and aptitudes of Nature around him. As man develops his own higher powers, Nature changes steadily in these aspects and aptitudes for him. The savage conforms and adapts himself to Nature. Never does he indulge one fretting thought or feeling about its ways, or move a muscle or effort against it. He lives in tranquil subjection to Nature, and dies as her autumn fruits and leaves fail on her bosom. But every stage and step and process of development for civilization puts man out of harmony and into antagonism with Nature. He resists and thwarts and fights Nature. For his own uses he changes all natural features and objects. He clears away the forests, kills its beasts, dams its streams, levels its hills, raises its valleys, blasts its rocks, tunnels its mountains. The Indian hears of these doings of the white man, or looks on, amazed, for he does none of them. Respect, or fear, or satisfaction, or indolent acquiescence, disposes him to accord with Nature, or to leave her as she is.

It is admitted that only civilized and cultivated man appreciates grand and beautiful objects, using his mind, soul, and taste to engage with simple senses upon them. The beauty and grandeur and glory of natural scenery — of a horizon notched by mountain tops, of floating clouds with their varying shadows, of the gorgeousness of the tinted foliage — do not appeal to a vacant mind or to a rude sensibility. But the savage mind was not a blank towards Nature, nor merely in a state of listlessness. As the savage was in accord with Nature, he was in perfect sympathy with it, and held free intercourse with it. The energy and activity of thought which civilized man gives to brooding and restless questioning and speculation, went with the