MANOA VALLEY.

73

of boarding scholars, seventeen. Boys can be fitted there for college; probably it will be found to be itself a Polynesian University in miniature, when hereafter graduates shall issue thence with academic degrees, and doctorates in the republic of letters be conferred upon mission-sprung or native-born Hawaiians.

I believe the boys and girls now there to be as happy and innocent a company of youth as ever were brought together, and they are in a fair way of being well disciplined and taught. None can question the propriety and needfulness of such an institution to a mission which has multiplied itself already, through God's blessing, by upward of one hundred and fifty living children. Its location at the Hawaiian metropolis is judicious-far enough from town to be out of the way of its scandal and noise, but near enough for the boys to have the benefit of one religious service at the Bethel every Sabbath.

In the rear of Punahou is the delightful Valley of Manoa, where, hidden by the trees and flowering shrubs, and velvet hill-sides that catch the rain, and lulled by the music of birds and purling brooks, a man may almost forget that a tropical sun is shining, and the stern cares and strife of life are passing upon the plain below. It was here that the strong-minded Elizabethan queen, Kaahumanu, retired to die in the faith of Christ. I have been once in the beautiful bamboo house where she breathed her last, and often since in my dreams have I gone back to that charming valley, when oceans have intervened.

It were well that the boys of the school, and the sunburned, adobe-walled residents often resorted there:

Ꭰ

'twould smooth the furrowed brow of business, and
cool the fervid blood of youth, and quicken the jaded
spirits of the too studious boy or laborious man.
is a saying of Wordsworth:

One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man,
Of human nature and of good, than all the sages can.

Nor less I deem that there are powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

And we can feed this mind of ours

IN A WISE PASSIVENESS.

It

The valley itself, to one secluded in it, is one of the loveliest that Nature has imbosomed in these romantic isles; the scenery bold and beautiful; the volcanic hills on either side crowned with the rich and deepgreen verdure; a sparkling brook making its way in a cascade over a precipice at the head of the vale, and, meandering along through it, creating beauty in its course; birds singing up among those bowers of verdure; watered kalo-patches, and kukui trees, with their silvery sheen, and now and then a glimpse of the azure sea.

Still away to the right, past the palm-groves of Waikiki, and at the foot of one of the extinct volcanoes, with a broad out-look on the ocean, are the remains of an ancient heiau, or heathen temple, its walls one hundred and thirty feet in length by seventy in breadth. Unless told that they were part of the sacred inclosure, called in Cook's voyages a morai, the visitor might suppose them to be the remains of some metropolitan hog-pen, like the suburban receptacles of that sort which have graced and perfumed the city of New York. Heathenism, hogs, and devils have gone together since the time that the latter, when

ANCIENT HEATHEN TEMPLE.

75

cast out of the possessed, entered into the whole herd of swine feeding. Good will it be for humanity when this triple alliance shall be broken the world over, as it seems to have been at the Sandwich Islands.

Within the memory of some persons now living, the heads of slain warriors in the battle of Nuuanu were seen impaled on the walls of this heiau, and human blood and bones for unknown ages have manured the crumbling lava all around it. "Hecatombs of vic

tims," says the historian, "have perished within its precincts, and it will remain for generations the dark and repulsive type to the Hawaiian of what this nation once was; while the dreary and frowning crest of Leahi, rising above, alike recalls the mind to that period when the fires and heavings of the earth beneath spread terror and destruction among the affrighted inhabitants. They stand well beside each other; one, the puny and desolate monument of man's apostasy; and the volcano, the wrathful sign that Nature shared the curse of Adam's crime."

CHAPTER IV.

HAWAIIAN HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY.

Even the favor'd isles

So lately found, although the constant sun
Cheer all their seasons with a grateful smile,
Can boast but little virtue, and, inert
Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain
In climate-victims of luxurious ease.
These, therefore, I can pity; placed remote
From all that science traces, art invents,
Or inspiration teaches; and inclosed
In boundless oceans never to be pass'd

By navigators uninform'd as they,

Or plow'd, perhaps, by British bark again.

COWPER.

THE muse of the gentle poet that indited these lines in the last century, was then all inadequate to project the important position on the map of the world, and on the highway of human progress, which those remote isles, whereof he doubted if they would ever be visited again, have now assumed. Those Hawaiian, or Sandwich Islands, so called by the English in honor of Lord Sandwich, were first made known to the rest of the world, at least to the commercial part, through their discovery of it by Captain Cook in the month of January, 1778. On the authority of Humboldt, in the late work entitled "Cosmos," Gaetano, a Spaniard, discovered one of the Sandwich Islands in the year 1542. But the discovery was not prosecu

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTANCES.

77

ted, and little or nothing was known of it till the voyage of Cook.

Placed far amid the melancholy main,

and lying on the direct route to India from the modern, perhaps the ancient Ophir, this island cluster, having eight summits, properly forms the Ararat of the North Pacific. They lie between the meridians of 155 and 160 west longitude, and between the parallels of 19 and 22 north latitude; about eighteen hundred miles from California, northeast; five thousand from China, west; five thousand from South America, southeast; twenty-seven hundred from the Society Islands on the south. The names of those inhabited, taken as they lie in order from southeast to northwest, are Hawaii, Maui, Kahoolawe, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, Kauai, Niihau, embracing an area of about six thousand one hundred square miles. They extend in a curved line four hundred miles, and would appear to be the summits of two parallel ranges of mountains or volcanic centers, of which the volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, are the southeastern extremities. These mountains are of nearly equal heights; Loa, according to the measurements of the United States Exploring Expedition, is thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty feet above half tide; Kea, thirteen thousand nine hundred and fifty; Mount Hualalai, on the same island, is about ten thousand. On Maui, the next of the group westward, Mount Haleakala, is ten thousand two hundred and seventeen feet high, and Eeka six thousand one hundred and thirty. Oahu has two ranges four thousand feet high, and the highest point of Kauai is eight thousand feet.