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NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

SCENERY AND A SCENE.

"Truth is no Doctoresse; she takes no degrees at Paris or Oxford, amongst great clerks, disputants, subtle Aristotles, men nodosi ingenii, able to take Lully by the chin; but oftentimes, to such an one as myself, an Idiota or common person, no great things, melancholizing in woods where waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains; whereas the silly man, expecting no such matter, thinketh only how best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with nature, her pleasaunt scenes, woods, waterfalls; on a sudden the Goddess herself, Truth, has appeared with a shining light and a sparkling countenance, so as ye may not be able lightly to resist her."-BURTON. "Ever thus

Drop from us treasures one by one;

They who have been from youth with us,
Whose every look, whose every tone,

Is linked to us, like leaves to flowers

They who have shared our pleasant hours-
Whose voices, so familiar grown,
They almost seem to us our own-

The echoes of each breath of ours

They who have ever been our pride,

Yet in their hours of triumph dearest

They whom we must have known and tried,

And loved the most when tried the nearest-
They pass from us, like stars that wane,

The brighest still before,

Or gold links broken from a chain

That can be join'd no more."

WILLIS.

JOB SMITH and myself were on the return from Niagara. It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon its bosom for days;-the ragged trees upon its green shore dropping their branches into the stirless water, as if it were some rigid imitation-the lake glass, and the leaves emerald;-the sky was of an April blue, as if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness, till could see through its clarified depths to the gates of heaven; and yet breathless and sunny as was the face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass, and searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of existence.

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No one can conceive, who has not had his imagination stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic solitudes of the west, the vastness of the unbroken phases of nature;-where every tree looks a king, and every flower a marvel of glorious form and colour-where the rocks are rent every one as by the "tenth" thunderbolt-and lake, mountain or river, ravine or waterfall, cave or eagle's nest, whatever it may be that feeds the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have shaped and left it— where the sculpture, and the painting, and the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of nature go on under the naked eye of the Almighty, and by His own visible and uninterrupted hand, and where the music of May.-VOL. XLIV, NO, CLXXIII,

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nature, from the anthem of the torrent and storm, broken only by the scream of the vulture, to the trill of the rivulet with its accompaniment of singing birds and winds, is for ever ringing its changes as if for the stars to hear-in such scenes, I say, and in such scenes only, is the imagination overtasked or stretched to the capacity of a seraph's; and while common minds sink beneath them to the mere inanition of their animal senses, the loftier spirit takes their colour and stature, and outgrows the common and pitiful standards of the world. Cooper and Leatherstocking thus became what they are-the one a high priest of imagination and poetry, and the other a simple-hearted but mere creature of instinct; and Cooper is no more a living man, liable to the common laws of human nature, than Leatherstocking a true and lifelike transcript of the more common effects of those overpowering solitudes on the character.

We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job and myself seated on the well-cushioned seats, with the blinds half turned to give us the prospect and exclude the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way. He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could argue without losing my temper; and the reason was, that I always had the last word, and thought myself victorious.

"We are about to return into the bosom of society, my dear Job," said I, looking with unctuous good nature on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the first time in a month that morning. (It is an unsentimental fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on the most poetical spots of earth).

"Yes," said Job; "but how superior is the society we leave behind! Niagara and Erie! What in your crowded city is comparable to these?' ""

Nothing, for size!-but for society-you will think me a Pagan, dear chum,-but, on my honour, straight from Niagara as I come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearning for the society of Miss Popkins!

Oh, Phil!”

"On my honour!"

"You, who were in such raptures at the Falls!"

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"And real ones-but I wanted a woman at my elbow to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have made up my mind on a great principle since we have been on our travels. Have you observed that I was pensive?

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"Not particularly-but what is your principle?'

"That a man is a much more interesting object than a mountain.” "A man! did you say

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"Yes-but I meant a woman!"

"I don't think so."

"I do!—and I judge by myself. When did I ever see wonder of nature-tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid, lake or river,—that I would not rather have been talking to a woman the while? Do you remember the three days we were tramping through the forest without seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless aisle of a cathedral? Do you remember the long morning when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara, and it was a divine luxury only to breathe? Do you remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on Goat Island? Do you remember the ten thousand glorious moments we have enjoyed between weather and scenery since the bursting of these summer-leaves? Do you?"

"Certainly, my dear boy!"

"Well, then, much as I love nature and you, there has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks, that, if I could have distilled a charming girl out of a mixture of you and any mountain, river, or rock that I have seen, I would not have flung you, without remorse, into any witch's cauldron that was large enough, and would boil at my bidding."

"Monster!"

"And I believe I should have the same feelings in Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures with things you can neither eat nor make love to."

"Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a day?"

"An hour, perhaps, it might; for I should be studying, in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure of some living Musidora-but I should soon tire of it, and long for my lunch or my love; and I give you my honour I would not lose the three meals of a single day to see Santa Croce and St. Peter's."

"Both?"

"Both."

Job either thought I was quizzing (which I was not) or disdained to argue against such a want of sentimental principle, and, pulling up the blind, he fixed his eyes on the slowly gliding panorama of rock and forest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck.

Mephistophes could hardly have found a more striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three hundred miles in the canal from lake Erie to the Hudson. As I walked up and down the deck of the packet-boat, I thought to myself, that if it were not for thoughts of things that come more home to one's "business and bosom " (particularly "bosom "), I could be content to retake my birth at Schenectady, and return to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat is a long and very pretty drawing-room afloat. It has a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or perceptible motion. It is drawn generally by three horses at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred miles a day as softly as if you were witch'd over the ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company (say fifty people) is such as pleases heaven; though I must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting the various dear friends I have made and left on that long canal) there are few highways on which you will meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers. On this occasion my star was bankrupt-Job Smith being my only civilized companion, and I was left to the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the scenery.

'Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remember, through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly-sown manhood, every moment of that lonely evening. I remember the progression of the sunset, from the lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds, to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star hung over the wilderness. And I remember what I am going to describe-a twilight anthem in the forest-as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition in the halffiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyerbeer. I thought time dragged heavily then, but I wish I had as light a heart and could feel as vividly now!

The Erie canal is cut through a hundred or two miles through the heart of the primeval wilderness of America, and the boat was gliding on silently and swiftly, and never sailed a lost cloud through the abysses of space on a course more apparently new and untrodden. The luxuriant soil had sent up a rank-grass that covered the horse-path like velvet; the Erie water was clear as a brook in the winding canal; the old shafts of the gigantic forest spurred into the sky by thousands, and the yet unscared eagle swung off from the dead branch of the pine, and skimmed the tree-tops for another perch, as if he had grown to believe that gliding spectre a harmless phenomenon of nature. The horses drew steadily and unheard at the end of the long line; the steersman stood motionless at the tiller, and I lay on a heap of baggage in the prow, attentive to the slightest breathing of nature, but thinking, with an ache at my heart, of Edith Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention it?) I was hastening with a lover's proper impatience. I might as well have taken another turn in my "fool's paradise."

The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop's finger; the whippoor-will had chanted the first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and the screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced without waiting to be importuned, though we were listening for the nightingale. The air, as I said before, had been all day breathless; but as the first chill of evening displaced the warm atmosphere of the departed sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored bosom of the canal, and then commenced the night anthem of the forest, audible, I would fain believe, in its soothing changes, by the dead tribes whose bones whiten amid the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly yet articulately, the suspended and wavering foliage of the birch was touched by the many-fingered wind, and, like a faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves rustled in the low branches, and, with a moment's pause, when you could hear the moving of the vulture's claws upon the bark, as he turned to get his breast to the wind, the increasing breeze swept into the pine-tops, and drew forth from their fringe-like and myriad tassels a low monotone like the refrain of a far-off dirge; and still as it murmured (seeming to you sometimes like the confused and heart-broken responses of the penitents on a cathedral floor), the blast strengthened and filled, and the rigid leaves. of the oak, and the swaying fans and chalices of the magnolia, and the rich cups of the tulip trees stirred and answered with their different voices like many-toned harps; and when the wind was fully abroad, and every moving thing on the breast of the earth was roused from its daylight repose, the irregular and capricious blast, like a player on an organ of a thousand stops, lulled and strengthened by turns, and from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the whisper of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging and groaning branches of the larch and the fir, the anthem went ceaselessly through its changes, and the harmony, (though the owl broke in with his scream, and though the over-blown monarch of the wood came crashing to the earth,) was still perfect and without a jar. It is strange that there is no sound of nature out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes into this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment of bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or the scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the out-burst of an octave flute above the even melody of an orchestra; and it is surprising how the large rain-drops, pattering

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