I mean the poetry of nature, with all its
quaint and beautiful superstitions. To every Algonquin a rotten log by
the road, covered with moss, suggests the wild legend of the log-demon;
the Indian corn and sweet flag in the swamp are the descendants of
beautiful spirits who still live in them; Meeko, the squirrel, has the
power of becoming a giant monster; flowers, beasts, trees, have all
loved and talked and sung, and can even now do so, should the magician
only come to speak the spell. And there are such magicians. Why should
he doubt it? If the squirrel once yielded to such a power in man, it
follows that some man may still have the power, or that he himself may
acquire it. And how much of this feeling of the real poetry of nature
does the white man or woman possess, who pities the poor ignorant
Indian? A few second-hand scraps of Byron and Tupper, Tennyson and
Longfellow, the jingle of a few rhymes and a few similes, and a little
second-hand supernaturalism, more "accepted" than felt, and that
derived from far foreign sources, does not give the white man what the
Indian _feels_. Joe, or Noel, or Sabattis may seem to the American
Philistine to be a ragged, miserable, ignorant Indian; but to the
_scholar_ he is by far the Philistine's superior in that which
life is _best_ worth living for.
The magic of the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot, like the magician himself,
is called _meteowlin_, _m'deoolin_ or _m'teoulin_.
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