Hark! I hear the traveller's song, And the shuddering murderer sits,‡ "The Five Confederated Nations (of Indians) were settled along the banks of the Susquehannah and the adjacent country, until the year 1779, when General Sullivan, with an army of 4000 men, drove them from their country to Niagara, where being obliged to live on salted provisions, to which they were unaccustomed, great numbers of them died. Two hundred of them, it is said, were buried in one grave, where they had encamped." Morse's American Geography. The alligator, who is supposed to lie in a torpici state all the winter, in the bank of some creek or pond, having previously swallowed a large number of pine-knots, which are his only sustenance during the time. This was the mode of punishment for murder (as Father Charlevoix tells us among the Hurons. "They laid the dead body upon poles at the top of a cabin, and the murderer was obliged to rema in several days together, and to receive all that dropged from the carcass, not only on himself but on his food." Lone beneath a roof of blood, Hither bend you, turn you hither "We find also collars of porcelain, tobacco, ears of maize, skins, etc. by the side of difficult and dangerous ways, on rocks, or by the side of the falls; and these are so many offerings made to the spirits which preside in these places," See Charlevoix's Letter on the Traditions and the Religion of the Savages of Canada. Father Hennepin too mentions this ceremony; he also says, "We took notice of one barbarian, Then, when night's long labour past, Sinking where the causeway's edge TELL me the witching tale again, 1802. Say, Love in all thy spring of fame, And even thy errors were divine! who made a kind of sacrifice upon an oak at the Cascade of St. Antony of Padua, upon the river Mississippi." See Hennepin's Voyage into North America. Did ever Muse's hand, so fair, Such perfume o'er thy altars shed? One maid there was, who round her lyre Oh! you that love's celestial dream, Love's sweetest lies, conceal'd in night, See the story in Apuleius. With respect to this beautiful allegory of Love and Psyche, there is an ingenious idea suggested by the senator Buonarotti, in his 16 Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi." He thinks the fable is taken from some very occult mysteries, which had long been eelebrated in honour of Love and he accounts, upon this supposition for the silence of the more ancient authors upon the subject, as it was not till towards the decline of pagan superstition, that writers could venture to reveal or discuss such ceremo nies; accordingly, he observes we find Lucian and Plutarch treating, without reserve, of the Dea Syria, and Isis and Osiris and Apuleius, who has given us the story of Cupid and Psyche, has also detailed some of the mysteries of Isis See the Giornale di Litterati d'Italia, Tom xxvii. articol. 1. See also the Observations upon the ancient Gems in the Mu seum Florentinum, Vol. i, p. 156. Dear PSYCHE! many a charmed hour, Where'er thy joys are number'd now, Hath chain'd thee to thy Cupid's breast ; Whether above the horizon dim, Along whose verge our spirits stray, Thou risest to a cloudless pole ! I cannot avoid remarking here an error into which the French Encyclopédistes have been led by M. Spon, in their article Psyche. They say, "Petron fait un récit de la pompe nuptiale de ces deux amans (Amour et Psyché) Déjá, dit il," etc. etc. The Psyche of Petronius, however, is a servantmaid, and the marriage which he describes is that of the young Pannychis See Spon's Recherches curieuses, etc. Dissertat. 5. * Allusions to Mrs. T-ghe's poem. By this image the Platonists expressed the middle state of the soul between sensible and intellec tual existence. |