he had drawn about twenty persons to his opinions, and they were intending to erect a plantation about the Narraganset bay, from whence the infection would easily spread into these churches, the people being many of them much taken with an apprehension of his godliness. Whereupon a warrant was sent to him to come presently to Boston, to be shipped, &c. He returned for answer, (and divers of Salem came with it,) that he could not without hazard of his life, &c. Whereupon a pinnace was sent with commission to Captain Underhill, &c., to apprehend him, and carry him on board the ship, which then rode at Nantascutt. But when they came to his house they found he had been gone three days, but whither they could not learn."

It thus appears that the object of his government, in directing his immediate apprehension at this time, was to prevent the establishment of a colony in which the civil authority should not be permitted to interfere with the religious opinions of the citizens.

Williams was in the thirty-seventh or thirty-eighth year of his age at the time of his banishment. He fled to a wilderness inhabited only by savages. The two principal tribes the Narra gansets and Wampanoags - had, but a short time before he entered their country, been engaged in open hostilities. The government of Plymouth had on one occasion extended its aid to its early friend and ally, Massasoit, chief sachem of the Wampanoags. This interference had smothered, but not extinguished the flame. With these warring tribes, one of which (the Narragansets) was a very martial and numerous people, and exceedingly jealous of the whites, Williams was under the necessity of establishing relations of amity. He himself says that he was forced to travel between their sachems to satisfy them and all their dependent spirits of his honest intentions to live peaceably by them. He acted the part of a peace-maker amongst them, and eventually won, even for the benefit of his persecutors, the confidence of the Narragansets. It was through his influence that all the Indians in the vicinity of Narraganset bay were, shortly after his settlement at Mooshausick, united, and their whole force, under the directions of the very men who had driven him into the wilderness, brought to co-operate with the Massachusetts forces against the Pequots.

[See Winthrop's Journal, and a Sketch of the Life of Roger Williams, appended to the first volume of the Rhode Island Historical Collections, for the above extracts.]

STANZA XII.

Much less my consort and these pledges dear.

Williams was the father of six children, viz: Mary, Freeborn, Providence, Mercy, Daniel, and Joseph. I am not able to determine their number at the time of his banishment.

STANZA XLIII.

Thrice did our northern tiger seem to come.

Frequently called the Panther, the Cat of the Mountain, or Catamount. There is indeed no animal of America entitled to the appellation of the Panther; but this name is frequently applied to the animal mentioned, and is adopted in this production for that reason.

STANZA LVIII.

'Twas Waban's cry at which the monsters ran.

The Indians imitate very perfectly the cry of wild beasts, and use that art in conveying signals and for other purposes, during their hunts and other expeditions. The known antipathy between the wolf and the catamount or panther, and the superiority of the latter over the former, may justify the text.

STANZA LXVI.

Where burning fagot nevermore shall glow,
Fired by the wrath of persecuting men.

I know not that the fagot has been generally used in any protestant country for the extirpation of heresy, yet its very general application to that purpose by Roman Catholics has, by common consent, made it the appropriate emblem of persecution in all countries.

STANZA LXIX.

Until Sowaniu's breezes scatter flowers again.

Sowaniu, or the Paradise of the Indians, was supposed to be an island in the far southwest. It was the favorite residence of their great god, Cawtantowit, and the land of departed spirits. The balmy southwest was a gale breathed from the heaven of the Indians.

STANZA LXXX.

"And may the Manittoo of dreams," he said, &c.

Manittoo a God. It is a word which seems to have been applied to an extraordinary power, or mysterious influence. Any astonishing effect, produced by a cause which the Indians could not comprehend, they appear to have ascribed to the agency of a Manittoo. It is natural for man to draw his ideas of power or causation, from what he feels in himself; and when he does so, he will ascribe the effects which he observes to the influence of mind. As he advances in knowledge the number of these mysterious agents diminishes, until at last he is forced upon the idea of one great, designing, first cause or agent. Man, from his very constitution, therefore, must be a believer in the existence of God. He approaches a knowledge of his unity by degrees, and improves in his religious opinions in the same manner as he advances to the science of astronomy. How essential then is that freedom of opinion which our Founder sought to establish!

was

CANTO SECOND.

STANZA XIII.

In a vast eagles's form embodied, He

Did o'er the deep on outstretched pinions spring.

It was the belief of the Chippewas, a tribe supposed to have descended from the same original stock (Lenni Lenape) with the Narragansets, that, before the earth appeared, all was one vast body of waters; that the Great Spirit, assuming the shape of a mighty eagle, whose eyes were as fire, and the sound of whose wings was as thunder, passed over the abyss, and that, upon his touching the water, the earth rose from the deep. It a prevailing tradition among the Delawares and other tribes, according to Heckewelder, that the earth was an island, supported on the back of a huge tortoise, called in the text Unamis. It is the object of the author to embrace in the text a selection of their scattered traditions on the subject of creation, and to give them something like the consistency of a system. Waban, therefore, adopting their leading ideas, has drawn out his description into the appropriate sequency of events. Their Creator was a Manittoo, a mysteriously operating power, and of the same nature as that principle of causation which they felt in themselves, as constituting their own being. The term Cowwewonck, in the Narraganset dialect, signified the soul, and was derived from Cowwene, to sleep; because, said they, it operates when the body sleeps. Hence in the text, whilst the Great Spirit slept, he is represented as commencing the work of creation-operating on the immense of waters as a part of his own being, and imparting to it organic existences, (as the soul from itself creates its own conceptions,) thus giving a sort of dreamy existence to the earth and all living things, ere He assumed the shape of the eagle, and at his fiat imparted to them substantial form and vital energy. The idea, that the earth was raised out of the Ocean, seems to have been pretty general amongst the Aborigines.

STANZA XIX.

Yet man was not; then great Cawtantowit spoke
To the hard mountain crags, and called for man.

According to the traditions of the Narragansets, the Great Spirit formed the first man from a stone, which, disliking, he broke, and then formed another man and woman from a tree; and from this pair sprang the Indians.

STANZA XXII.

Then did he send Yotaanit on high

Yotaanit was the God of Fire; Keesuckquand, God of the Sun; Nanapaushat, of the Moon; and Wamponand was the ruling Deity of the East.

STANZA XXIII.

All things thus were formed from what was good,

And the foul refuse every evil had ;

But it had felt the influence of the God,

(How should it not?)

Heckewelder ascribes to the Indians the opinion that nothing bad could proceed from the Great and Good Spirit. Waban is here speaking in conformity to that opinion. Hence he represents the creation of Chepian, or the evil principle, as an incidental but necessary effect, yet forming no part of the original design.

STANZA XXVII.

And manittoos, that never death shall fear,
Do too within this moral form abide.

"They conceive," says Williams, "that there are many gods, or divine powers, within the body of man - in his pulse, heart, lungs, &c."

XXVIII.

But if a sluggard and a coward, then
To rove all wretched in the gloom of night.