of un nouveau Chateaubriand ; and he is none other than Chahta-Ima, the last of the Indian missionaries, the good father Adrien Rouquette. None but one whose life had been passed in communion with nature in all her moods could have written such a book ; —it seems to have the very odor of a pine-forest ; and on turning its pages a breeze from the prairie seems to aid the fingers of the reader.
Aside from the religious idea which permeates, like a leaven, the whole structure of the volume, La Nouvelle Atala offers a curious study from a purely literary point of view. It reflects the spirit of a life,—a most unique and strange life, such as will doubtless never be lived again in this country ; the life of a missionary so enamored with nature and solitude, and of the simple and healthy existence of those who call him Black-robe Father, that he has become even as one of them, as his Indian appellation teaches us ; —a priest whose temple is the forest, with the cloud-frescœd heaven for its roof, and for its aisles, the pillared magnificence of the pines,—whose God is the God of the Wilderness, the Great Spirit overshadowing the desert. Poetically does the author express this sentiment in his preface :
Perhaps La Nouvelle Atala may seem, in the eyes of the great masters of modern aesthetics, the more wild, strange, and savage, the closer her relationship to primitive nature, and the closer her union to the God of that nature,—who is also the God of true philosophy and the God of true religion. In the mighty cities, in the great intellectual centres, before the hearths of this great age of knowledge, will she find a place,—though it should be even the last,—in the company of her pale-faced brothers and sisters. I
