Day after day in the same gray twilight did Behemoth cast his shadow from the summit of some near elevation; and midnight after midnight, at the same cold and sullen hour, did he descend and force his huge bulk through the villages of the Mound-builders: breaking their walls in pieces, rending their dwellings, disclosing their mounds and despoiling their pleasure gardens from end to end. He had become the spectral visitant of the nation;— the monstrous and inexorable tyrant who, apparently gliding from the land of shadows, presented him self eternally to them, the destroyer of their race. He seemed, in these terrible incursions, to be fired with a mighty revenge for some unforgiven injury inflicted on his dead and extinct tribe by the human family. In the calm and solemn quiet of night, when fretted labor sought repose and anxious thought craved slumber, he burst down from the mountains like thunder and bade them — " Sleep no more!"

The internal and external influence of an harassment like this could not be otherwise than large and disastrous. First came the dire change in the mind itself: when this terrible shadow glided among its quiet emotions, its familiar habits, and its household and national thoughts. All objects that had hitherto occupied a place in the mind of the people now assumed a new color and complexion as this portent fell upon them, in the same manner as every thing in nature catches a portion of the gloom of twilight when it suddenly approaches. No angle of the wide realm of the Mound-builders escaped from the darkness of fear, and every where the fountains of social life became stagnant and ceased to issue in healthy currents, like streams that are silent and still when light has departed from their surface.

The voice of joy died away into a timid and feeble smiling; proud and stately ambition fell humbled to the earth, and love and beauty trembled and fled before the gloomy shadow of the general adversary. Men shunned each other as if from a consciousness of their abasement, and skulked away from the face of day, unwilling that the heavens should look in upon their desolation and shame.

Some abandoned their homes and took refuge in cliffs and inaccessible precipices; preferring poverty and exposure to wind and tempest and hostile weather, rather than encounter with a foe so dreadful and triumphant. The great mass however lingered in their customary dwellings: but so thoroughly was every motive to action numbed and paralyzed, they neglected to repair the roof that had fallen, the beam that had decayed, or the foundation that had yielded to the summer's rain, and innumerable buildings throughout the whole realm tumbled into ruin, and many that stood on the borders of rivers, undermined by the motion of their currents, tottered and fell into the stream, while their terror-stricken inmates, in many cases, perished without a struggle.

The ordinary occupations and duties of life were performed with feeble hands and vague thoughts, or entirely deserted.

This mighty and puissant nation, whose strength was that of a giant and whose glory rivalled the sun, was stricken by terror into a feeble and child-like old age. All its proportions were diminished ; its heart was shrunk, and it dragged on a slothful and decrepid existence amid the cold and monumental ruins of what had once been its beautiful domain and its house of honor and joy.

Part First, pages 22-24