Dr. Brinton
(_E. of A_., 297) has found the Mexican songs the most delicate. He
quotes two Aztec love-poems, the first being from the lips of an
Indian girl:
I know not whether thou hast been absent:
I lie down with thee, I rise up with thee,
In my dreams thou art with me.
If my ear-drop trembles in my ears,
I know it is thou moving within my heart.
The second, from the same language, is thus rendered:
On a certain mountain side,
Where they pluck flowers,
I saw a pretty maiden,
Who plucked from me my heart,
Whither thou goest,
There go I.
Dr. Brinton also quotes the following poem of the Northern Kioways as
"a song of true love in the ordinary sense:"
I sat and wept on the hillside,
I wept till the darkness fell;
I wept for a maiden afar off,
A maiden who loves me well.
The moons are passing, and some moon,
I shall see my home long-lost,
And of all the greetings that meet me,
My maiden's will gladden me most.
"The poetry of the Indians is the poetry of naked thought. They have
neither rhyme nor metre to adorn it," says Schoolcraft (_Oneota,_ 14).
The preceding poem has both; what guarantee is there that the
translator has not embellished the substance of it as he did its form?
Yet, granting he did not embroider the substance, we know that weeping
and longing for an absent one are symptoms of sensual as well as of
sentimental love, and cannot, therefore, be accepted as a criterion.
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