Blow winds, blow! my sister lingers
       From her dwelling in the sky,
     Where the morn with rosy fingers,
       Shall her cheeks with vermil dye.

     There, my earliest views directed,
       Shall from her their color take,
     And her smiles, through clouds reflected,
       Guide me on, by wood and lake.

“The work abounds with similar beautiful thoughts and inventions.

“Catlin may be called the red man’s painter; Schoolcraft his poetical historian.  They have each painted in living colors the workings of the Indian mind, and painted nature in her unadorned simplicity.  They have done much which, without them, would, perhaps, have remained undone, and become extinct with the Indian race.  As monuments of history for future ages, their works are not sufficiently appreciated.

“The author of these volumes has stamped upon his page much of the intellectual existence of the simple children of the forest, and bequeathed us a detail map of their terra incognita—­their fireside amusements in legendary lore.”

I am willing to notice this and some other criticisms of this work as popular expressions of opinion on the subject.  But it is difficult for an editor to judge, from the mere face of the volumes, what an amount of auxiliary labor it has required to collect these legends from the Indian wigwams.  They had to be gleaned and translated from time to time.  Seventeen years have passed since I first began them—­not that anything like this time, or the half of it, has been devoted to it.  It was one of my amusements in the long winter evenings—­the only time of the year when Indians will tell stories and legends.  They required pruning and dressing, like wild vines in a garden.  But they are, exclusively (with the exception of the allegory of the vine and oak), wild vines, and not pumpings up of my own fancy.  The attempts to lop off excrescences are not, perhaps, always happy.  There might, perhaps, have been a fuller adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what a world of verbiage must have been retained.  The Indians are prolix, and attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only does not help forward the denouement, but is tedious and witless to the last degree.  The gems of the legends—­the essential points—­the invention and thought-work are all preserved.

Their chief value I have ever thought to consist in the insight they give into the dark cave of the Indian mind—­its beliefs, dogmas, and opinions—­its secret modes of turning over thought—­its real philosophy; and it is for this trait that I believe posterity will sustain the book.