While they were repairing the wheel, I strolled to a log cabin at a little distance, surrounded by a few cultivated fields, bristling with dead trees, where I was frankly and courteously invited in by a little middle-aged dame, carelessly, or, according to our notions, rather slovenly dressed-her head in pic-talking for many a day. turesque disorder, and her shoes down at the heels. In ascending the Mississippi, the first great tribuHer countenance, however, was intelligent, agreea-tary is the Red River, whose sources are in the Corble, and full of vivacity. The room was peopled with children of all sizes, sturdy little brats, with ruddy cheeks, blue eyes, and yellow hair. There is no ceremony here, and in a few moments the little woman gave me her history, which was, to say the truth, rather more brief than a modern biography, that ninety-nine times in a hundred reminds me of Cowper's Epigram | first introduction, should revolt at this frankness in the lady of the forest of Arkansas, I must entreat them to recollect that she lived in one of the most lonely spots on the bank of the Mississippi, and probably had not enjoyed such a good opportunity of "O! fond attempt, to give a deathless lot dilleras of Mexico. It is a stream of great length and volume, but it causes no more sensible change in the magnitude of the former, than the accession of a single drop of water. Such is the case with this Great Father of Rivers everywhere, till you come to its junction with the Missouri, when a sensible difference is apparent. But the Red River, the White River, the St. Francis, the Arkansas, the Black River, the Osage, the Ohio, all streams which in any other part of the globe, except America, would be considered of the first class, and whose course is from eight to twenty-five hundred miles, successively render their tribute from the surrounding world without any perceptible addition to this vast treasury of waters. They frequently run parallel with the Mis as if fearful of the encounter; and when at length they venture to grapple with the mighty bully, are swept away in an instant, leaving only a few bubbles to indicate the feeble struggle that precedes their final dissolution. This peculiar feature, more than any other, impresses the mind with the idea of vast and almost incomprehensible magnitude. Our heroine had been "raised" at Nashville, mar-sissippi, sometimes approaching, at others receding, ried a gentleman who appeared in a carriage and four, as a wooer, and afterwards walked on foot as a married man. When the little dame came to this, she laughed herself fairly out of breath. From thence she was carried to Arkansas, where her husband had made a speculation with the proceeds of his equipage, and settled down at a distance of ten or fifteen miles from any human habitation. Here she fell into another fit of laughter. Her husband had been absent upward of two months on a trading voyage to New Orleans, and they would have got on very comfortably in the mean time, had it not been for the bears, which came about at night, committing depredations on the pigs and chickens. "I have nobody to drive them away but the dogs and these boys," said she, pointing to a couple of sturdy little fellows, the larger certainly not more than twelve years old. "They were out last night after them, but they got off with a pig and two chickens!" and this was a subject for another laugh, which, like the rest, had all the characteristics of genuine hilarity. I remarked the encroachments of the river, just in front of the house. Yes," said she, "last year it carried away our barn, and a good piece of land. I suppose the house will go next!" And once more she almost expired with laughter. Her merriment was not the result of folly or want of due reflection, but the admirable product of the schooling of a series of vicissitudes and exposures, that ever fortifies us against those excoriating rubs of life, which, to those who always bask in its sunshine, and revel among its flowers, would prove sufficient to wreck their happiness forever. Our little woodland philosopher was neither ignorant nor vulgar, and if any of our fashionable female readers, who permit a precious bewhiskered cosmopolite to take them round the waist, and whirl them through the voluptuous mazes of a waltz, a moment after the Voyagers on this river complain of the monotony of its scenery, but though on it eight days in succession, I was never tired. The shores, it is true, are for the most part low and level; but the vast and magnificent forests with which they are everywhere crowned, give them an appearance of elevation quite imposing, especially as they seem towering in the skies, there being nothing behind them. They appear, at a distance, like massive walls or terraces of deep green, rising directly from the water, and following, as they do, the ever graceful windings of the river, exhibit everywhere endless successions of beautiful curves, projecting points, and corresponding bends on the opposite shore. From New Orleans to St. Louis there are but two or three reaches where one can see twenty miles before him, and consequently the voyager is never sated with the same view. The prospect is incessantly varying; for though the ingredients are always water, wood and skies, their combination is always different. As the prospect opens in front, it gradually closes in the rear, thus at all times presenting a moving panorama. Every moment the boat is shooting round some porjecting point, and discovering scenery which is new, though it may resemble that we have just passed. There is always the excitement of anticipation, and the imagination is forever busy picturing something more beautiful beyond the dark barrier of the noble forest that everywhere bounds the prospect. is perpetual change, and change is itself variety. Steamboats and broadhorns are almost constantly in sight during the day, and the contrast between the There perfection of art, and its earliest efforts, is not a little | eddy is formed, or a current subsides at some partistriking. The broadhorn glides lazily down the cular spot, depositing the sediment, or heaping up stream in all the luxury of passive indolence, a rude the sands of the river. Here a portion of that vast mass of rude materials; the other breasts the om- accumulation of wood which comes floating down nipotent torrent by a succession of triumphant efforts, from the tributaries, and centres in the Mississippi, puffing forth her snowy clouds of steam, in quick is intercepted, and here the sand and sediment subpanting breathings that seem to indicate the mighty sides. It is surprising how soon one of these islands efforts she is making, and signalizes her progress by is formed, and, as if by some effort of magic, clothed a succession of cannonadings that may be heard for with verdure. The cotton tree, which everywhere miles. They actually tremble with their exertions, abounds, receives its name from bearing a fruit or and I sometimes imagined my very bones ached from pod, which at the proper season expands, and fills pure sympathy, as did those of Sancho Panza, when the air with little tufts of a substance resembling cothe saw his master tossed in a blanket. It is the ton, which contain the principle of vegetation. These general impression of those who have investigated lighting on the new formations, almost spontaneously the subject, that the building of steamboats has been produce a little forest of cotton trees. Every year a losing business on the Western waters. This is brings new accessions to the island, and a new greatly to be regretted, since, in other respects, the growth of verdure, in regular gradation, from the introduction of steam has contributed more to the little plant just peeping above the water, to the high growth and prosperity of this vast region, than any tree growing on the part which was first formed. other cause, if we except the activity, energy and sagacity of its inhabitants, and the exuberant bounties of nature, which are not paralleled in any other region of equal magnitude on the face of the earth. It is here, with the blessing of Heaven, we are to look for a population of almost countless millions, whose own fault it will be, if they are not the happiest people in the world. Already the young giant of the West preponderates over the pigmies of the Union, and though I rejoice in the rapidity of his growth, Irior year become deeper and deeper, until they ashope he will prove an exception to almost all the race of overgrown monsters, by making a judicious and moderate use of his strength, when he comes to years of discretion. Yet, in going up the rivers of the West and SouthWest, one cannot help wondering where the millions who people this region have hid themselves. In our part of the country, the best houses, the best cultivation, and the closest population, are seen on the banks of the rivers, and it is there we always put the best foot foremost. But here, on the banks of the rivers, with here and there the exception of a little town, or solitary plantation, you see nothing but the primeval forests, their vast trees nodding over the margin. The people generally cherish an impression that the neighborhood of their rivers, which rise to a height of sixty or seventy feet during the freshets, that occur annually, where they are confined by high banks, and overflow the country where they are low, is unhealthy. For this reason they build their houses at a distance, out of sight of travelers, and the banks exhibit few traces of cultivation. This is particularly the case with the coasts of Arkansas and Missouri, where you see scarcely any traces of the hundreds of thousands who people these States, and who live beyond the recesses of the forest that skirts the margin of the Mississippi. The formation of new points and islands is a process continually going on in this river, which is perpetually robbing Peter to pay Paul; and these constitute its most beautiful features. It wears away, or cuts off a point above, to form another below with the spoils. The islands are formed much in the same way. A great tree grounds on some shallow; or an Nothing in nature is more beautiful than these new creations, rising from the bosom of the river, which is one continued succession of Lake scenery, and exhibiting regular terraces of verdure, the growth of successive seasons, and rising above the other and as perfectly defined as if graduated with the most consummate art. The latest growth, apparently growing out of the water, is of an exquisitely soft delicate green; the tints of the growth of every ante sume the dark hues of the primeval forest. These islands seem floating on the surface of the water, and sometimes in a peculiar state of the atmosphere, appear elevated above its surface, floating in the air. Though its highest part is not more than a few feet above the level of the river, yet the regular succession of terraces of trees one above the other, convey the impression that they are planted on a conical hill, and have all the effect of elevations of two or three hundred feet. The Mississippi at night, and especially moonlight nights, appears in all its glory, and during a voyage of eight days, we were favored day and night with delightful weather without a storm, and almost without a cloud. The nights were calm, clear and bright, and under the magic of the moonbeams all the unamiable features of the river disappeared. The expanse of water, sometimes two or three miles broad, was one smooth glassy mirror set in a frame of dark majestic forest, apparently enclosing it on all sides. The boiling eddies and floating trees that disfigure its surface and agitate its bosom, all disappear in the bright lustre which envelopes them, and the turbidness of the waters can no longer be detected. The skies of the Southern region are of a deeper blue, and purer transparency than those of the North, and I sometimes thought I could see far befond the stars, which are not, however, so bright and sparkling as in our keen, frosty winter nights. Nothing is heard bnt the splashing of the wheels and the puffing of the steam, which in a day or two is scarcely noticed, and the dark forest-lined shores exhibit no sign of life or animation, except occasionally a distant light kindled on the bank, as a signal to stop and take in a passen ger. The repose of the scene is profound, but not | choose to be responsible, a respectable buckeye told dreary, for every object above and around is sublime me of a traveler, who, once upon a time, sailing over or beautiful, and I am tempted to regret that I have the city during an inundation, saw a man in a canoe not more years of life before me, to enjoy its recol-sounding with a long pole, who being interrogated as lections. The confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio is striking and grand. The latter approaches in a coy angle, a clear and gentle stream, about three quarters of a mile wide. The former comes rushing down like a roaring bully, and the placid Ohio, seeming unaware of its fate, is suddenly seized upon by this voracious monster, like Proserpine by Pluto, and swallowed up in an instant. You see no traces of its current having made the slightest impression on Old Father Mississippi, who dashes on as if unconscious of this new auxiliary, and I found him as great a bully just above, as he was just below. At the junction of these rivers, is a large accumulation of sand of some forty or fifty feet high, on which is founded the city of Grand Cairo, so famous in the annals of speculation. It is, indeed, a noble site, of which Father Charleroix thus wrote more than a hundred and twenty years ago, in recording his voyage to New Orleans. "We passed on the left, by the fine river Ouabasche, (Wabash) by which one may go quite up to the Iroquois, when the waters are high. Its entrance into the Mississippi is little less than a quarter of a league wide. There is no place in Louisiana more fit, in my opinion, for a settlement than this, nor where it is of more consequence to have one. All the country that is watered by the Ouabasche, and by the Ohio which runs into it,* is very fruitful: it consists of vast meadows, well watered, where the wild buffaloes feed by thousands. Furthermore, the communication with Canada is as easy as by the river of the Illinois, and the way much shorter. A fort, with a good garrison, would keep the savages in awe, especially the Cherokees, who are at present the most numerous nation on this continent." The good father appears not to have been aware that this fine site was sometimes overflowed by the Ohio on one hand, and the Mississippi on the other, than which two more formidable assailants could hardly be found in this world. But for this, it would be a noble site for a great city. I counted, I think, some forty or fifty buildings of various kinds, among which is an establishment for steamboat machinery, at which some boats were repairing. Upon the whole, the speculation I should presume is rather premature than mad. New Orleans is actually below the Mississippi, when at its flood, and would be annually inundated but for the levee. The same means will protect Grand Cairo, and it do n't seem to me altogether impossible that a great town may grow up there, a hundred years hence. To be sure, this is a long while to wait, but Rome was not built in a day, and a century of anticipation is nothing now-a-days. Be this as it may, Grand Cairo is a favorite subject for quizzing, and has many good stories fastened on its shoulders. Among others, for which I don't It would seem from this, that the early name of the Ohio was Wabash. to what he was doing, answered and said, "I am surveying the city and laying out lots, but find my pole is not quite long enough." I was informed, however, that the process of raising the site or protecting it by embankment, I forget which, was actually going on, the London bankers who furnished the capital for the first investment and expenditures, having agreed to further advances. I was in hopes there had been an end of this business of playing the fool at the expense of other people, and dancing while John Bull paid the piper. I thought our credit had become so bad that we could borrow no more, which in my opinion is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and almost worth the price of national bankruptcy. Unlimited credit will ruin any man, or any state; and the best possible security against foolish or unprincipled prodigality, is being so poor that nobody in his senses will trust us. Here I left the Mississippi, and proceeded up the Ohio, on an excursion which has no connection with my present purpose, and from which I returned about a month afterwards, proceeding up the former river to St. Louis, and thence to the mouth of the Illinois. The temperature of the Ohio and Mississippi I found most sensibly and disagreeably different, on this latter excursion. The wind blew fresh from the Northwest, and the nights were as cold as with us in autumn. Indeed, for the rest of my journey, though it was midsummer, I found no occasion for summer clothing, until I arrived at Utica, and descended the valley of the Mohawk. Above the Grand Tower, which we passed late at night, the river occasionally loses its uniformity, and especially about the old French settlement of St. Genevieve, becomes quite different. Here commence the mineral region and high cliffs of limestone rocks, with all their variety of tints and foliage seen nodding over the stream. We discover everywhere traces of this country having been first explored and occupied by the French, who found their way hither from Canada, establishing themselves at Kaskaskias, Fort Chartres, Tamaroas, St. Genevieve, St. Louis, and at the river Marasnes, where are those mines which gave rise to Law's famous Mississippi bubble, in the year 1719. As early as 1712, it appears from the records of the commonwealth of Virginia, that John Howard and others were sent to examine this region, and were made prisoners by the French, who came from a settlement they had on an island in the Mississippi, a little above the Ohio, where they made salt, lead, &c., which they carried to New Orleans in a fleet of canoes, guarded by a large armed schooner. The earliest pioneers were fathers Marquette and Hennepin, the Sieur Joliet, and the celebrated La Salle, whose adventurous exposures, toils and sufferings, present the most memorable examples of what men can do and dare, when animated by religious fervor, or incited by the love of wealth or the passion for glory. We arrived at St. Louis early in the morning, and found the entire bank of the river in front of the city lined with steamboats, whose galleries and long rows of Venetian doors formed what appeared a street of gay summer-houses. This is by far the most flourishing town I visited in the course of a journey of seven thousand miles, and I know of no place where clever, industrious young men of any honest profession would in my opinion find a better opening for pursuing their career. There are several thousand Germans in this city, and I was surprised at the great numbers of them in almost all the towns on the Mississippi and Ohio. They are everywhere useful acquisitions, plying at their trades, cultivating gardens and infusing a taste for music, wherever they sojourn. This is a very handsome, polite, orderly city. Now and then, indeed, a rencontre takes place in the streets, or a visit is paid to Bloody Island, just opposite. But every place has its peculiar amusements, and there is no accounting for tastes. Leaving St. Louis, where I had been detained by indisposition for some days, the first point of interest is the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi. This is perhaps the finest confluence in the world. Just above, the latter stream appears gliding down among wooded bluffs and islands, until it encounters the termagant Missouri, and meets the fate it inflicts upon all its other tributaries. The Missouri dashes right across against the opposite shore of the Mississippi, in a line as straight as an arrow, and as well defined as that between light and darkness. Here, for the first and only time, the Mississippi is conquered and acknowledges a master. Henceforth, its current, its waters and its banks undergo a complete transformation, and it retains nothing but a name to which its claim is doubtful. Both rivers are nearly a mile wide, and when the imagination expands itself to a conception of the vast distance of their sources, the immense regions they have traversed to come together, and the magnitude of their contributions collected from a boundless region whose extent is yet undefined, it is fully impressed with all the attributes of sublimity. The upper and lower Mississippi are the antipodes of each other; and as, after toiling day by day against its turbid boiling current, we shot in an instant into a clear, calm, quiet basin, skirted with round woody hills, and dotted with verdant isles, it was like the sudden cessation of a whirlwind. To my great regret, however, the boat stopped several hours at Alton, and it was night before she proceeded on her voyage. I saw no more of this famous river, and awoke next morning, gliding quietly up the beautiful and gentle Illinois. ROME. Roma, Roma, Roma! Non è piu come era prima. Ημισυ γαρ τ' αρετης αποαίνυται ευρύοπα Ζυές * Ανέρος αυτ' αν μεν κατά δούλιον ημας έλησιν. THE mighty of the earth are low; How, reft of all that made her great, That breathed but in the public Weal; The frugal Meal, the Sabine Farm, Had lost their long-inspiring charm; These were the Flowers of Freedom's glorious day; With HER they rose and bloomed; with her they passed away. But lo! emerging from the shade, Proud Vice unveils her bloated face; • Alas! when Virtue's blossoms fade, How soon rank weeds usurp their place! O Rome, lost Rome! So long the parent-earth Of Freedom, Learning, and heroic Worth, What art thou now? Degraded, desolate, The den of Priestcraft, Rapine, Falsehood, Hate, And black Abominations that pollute The soul of Man and link him with the Brute,Who but could weep to see thy fallen state? Hom. Od. xvii. 322. God's hallowed image thus debased, His blooming Eden trod to waste? E'en Nature mourns for Man's decay; The Sun shoots forth a cheerless ray, And Skies, once pure as Morning's breath, Are lowering with disease and death. -Meanwhile, through voiceless plains, O'er many a monument of perished fame, And many a wreck of time, and flood, and flame, Diminished Tyber winds his weary way, A distinguished philosopher of our day dwells with much feeling and eloquence on the emotions with which the Geor gies of Virgil must have been read by an ancient Roman, "while he recollected that period in the history of his country when dictators were called from the plough to the defence of the State, and, after having led monarchs in triumph, returned again to the same happy and independent occupation a state of manners to which a Roman author of a later age looked back with such enthusiasm, that he ascribes, by a bold poetical figure, the flourishing state of agriculture, under the Republic, to the grateful returns which the earth then made to the illustrious hands by which she was cultivated. Gaudente terrà vomere laureato et triumphali Aratore,"-Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind, Part II. c. v. §2. THE WITCH OF ENDOR. BY MRS. SEBA SMITH. THE unfortunate are always superstitious; just in proportion as the calamities of life impair the freedom of the human mind, do the elements of the dark and the mysterious gather about it. The past has been embittered by care and disappointment; and, in the words of Scripture, their "way is hedged up," there is no hopeful vista to relieve the gloom of the present, and they appeal to omens, predictions, and the rude superstitions current amongst the vulgar. Ardent and impulsive, he now goeth up and down in the spirit of prophecy, with the strange men who expound its mysteries, and anon he sendeth the bloody tokens to the tribes of Israel, rousing them from the yoke of oppression. Generous and heroic, he repels the foes of his people, and loads the chivalric David with princely favors. Yet beneath all this, like hidden waters, heard but unseen, lurked this dark and gloomy mysticism, that embittered even his proudest and brightest hours. An evil spirit troubled him, which only the melody of the sweet psalmist of Israel could beguile. Too feeble to boldly enter the precincts of Truth, grasping with a strong faith the very horns of the altar; and thus to learn how the temporary yields to that which is eternal; how the partial is lost in the Moses had been familiar with all the forms of universal; they linger about the threshold, perplex- Egyptian worship, and all their many sources of ing themselves with dim shadows and faint intima- knowledge: but, as the promulgator of a new and tions. They pause in the vestibule, where Supersti-holier faith, he wished to draw his people from the tion sits portress, rather than enter to worship Truth subtleties of divination, and induce them to a direct herself. It is the error of their destiny more than their own. The light that is in them has become darkness. The clearness and vigor of perception is lost under the pressure of circumstances, in which human wisdom would seem to be of no avail, and they yield at length as to an irresistible fate. The history of Saul, the first king of Israel, is an affecting record of this kind. Raised to the dignity of royal power, by no ambition of his own, but by Divine appointment, in compliance with the will of a people weary of their Theocracy, we look upon him from the first as an instrument, a being impelled rather than impelling. Painful, indeed, is the contrast of the proud and handsome youth commencing his royal career in the freshness and freedom of early manhood, when life presented but a long perspective of sunshine and verdure, to that of the stricken man, weighed down by calamities, bereft of hope, bereft of faith, yet manfully marching to that fatal field where death only had been promised him. From the commencement of his career the "choice young man and goodly" seems to have had a leaning to the occult, a willingness to avail himself of mysterious power, rather than to arrive at results through ordinary and recognized channels. We find him commissioned by his father, going forth in quest of three stray asses, which he seeks, not by the hillsides and pastures of Israel, but by consulting the seer, Samuel. The holy man hails him king, and gently rebukes him as to the object of his visit, by saying, "set not thy mind upon the asses which were lost three days ago, for they are found.” and open reliance upon Him who alone "knoweth the end from the beginning." No insight to the future is needed by the strong in faith and the strong in action. Hence the divinely appointed legislator prohibited all intercourse with those who dealt in this | forbidden lore-forbidden, as subversive of human hope and human happiness. For the mind loses its tone when once impressed with the belief that the "shadows of coming events" have fallen upon it. The impetuous and vacillating Saul, impelled by an irresistible instinct to this species of knowledge, sought to protect himself from its influence by removing the sources of it from his kingdom. For this reason he put in force the severe enactments of Moses against dealers in what were termed "familiar spirits." Thus betraying the infirmity of his manhood, by removing temptation rather than bravely resisting it. Vain and superstious, oh "choice young man and goodly," thou wert no match for the rival found in the person of the chivalric David, the warrior poet, the king minstrel, the man of many crimes, yet redeeming all by the fervency of his penitence, and his unfaltering faith in the Highest. Yet the noble and the heroic did never quite desert thee, even when thou didst implore the holy prophet to honor thee in the presence "of the elders of the people," and he turned and worshiped with thee. A kingly pageant when the sceptre was departing from thee. Disheartened by intestine troubles, appalled by foreign invasion, the spirit of the unhappy king forsook him, and it is said " his heart greatly trembled." Samuel, the stern and uncompromising revealer of truth, was no more. Unsustained by a hearty reliance |