Here he lurked about like a spectre among the
scenes of former power and prosperity, now bereft of home, of
family, and of friend. There needs no better picture of his
destitute and piteous situation than that furnished by the homely
pen of the chronicler, who is unwarily enlisting the feelings of
the reader in favor of the hapless warrior whom he reviles.
"Philip," he says, "like a savage wild beast, having been hunted
by the English forces through the woods above a hundred miles
backward and forward, at last was driven to his own den upon
Mount Hope, where he retired, with a few of his best friends,
into a swamp, which proved but a prison to keep him fast till the
messengers of death came by divine permission to execute
vengeance upon him."
Even in this last refuge of desperation and despair a sullen
grandeur gathers round his memory. We picture him to ourselves
seated among his care-worn followers, brooding in silence over
his blasted fortunes, and acquiring a savage sublimity from the
wildness and dreariness of his lurking-place. Defeated, but not
dismayed--crushed to the earth, but not humiliated--he seemed to
grow more haughty beneath disaster, and to experience a fierce
satisfaction in draining the last dregs of bitterness.
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