AUDUBON AND BOONE. 163 



and agility of a j oung panther was not a turbulent one. He 

 rebelled against the life of usages that we call society not 

 because he lacked the strength or the firmness to battle with 

 it but because he lacked the will or desire to do so. Ho 

 was too young and too healthy for misanthropy ; and, if he 

 had been older and less healthy, the social conditions with 

 which he was familiar were too simple for him to have realized 

 that contamination of vice which sometimes goes far to breed 

 distrust, disgust and hate in even strong natures. 



No ! if ever a wild creature gentle, and yet terrible in 

 gentleness went on two feet through the shadowed heart of 

 forests, the young Boone was one ! He knew nothing of any 

 world but God's world of any law but the right of any 

 conscience but his own of any Power but that which dwelt 

 above in nature, and in his own good right arm and unerring 

 rifle. 



In a word, he was the Patriarch of that "Wild Turkey 

 breed" of tameless wanderers peculiar to this Continent; and 

 from the restless and wary instincts of which our progress 

 towards almost boundless empire upon the hemisphere takes 

 origin. 



" He might have been civilized !" as a gentleman, of 

 Chestnut or Broadway inspecting through an eye-glass his 

 powerful frame and ruddy cheeks may be supposed to lisp ! 

 but that would have spoiled a man ! a man of might ! 

 the father of a State. 



You could not have tamed such a man as Daniel Boone 

 into the mere conventional slave while there was " elbow 

 room," as he memorably termed it, in the world. If he had 

 been chained, that dogged perseverance that invincible self- 

 reliance that deathless love for the natural and the free 

 would have made him a most formidable galley slave ; under 

 any institutions he would have been a terrible agent of revo- 

 lution and overthrow. 



Indeed, one great cause of the solidity of our government 



