had a capital opportunity to observe the wild ghany Mountains) from Trail Mountain in Geormagnificence of the angry element, we were very gia, along the Hiwassee, a tributary of the Tenmuch of opinion with the Englishman who got nessee, into North Carolina across the spurs of wet at Niagara, that "certainly it was very well the Nantihala, says in its way, but that, on the whole he preferred looking at an hengraving of it in the 'ouse."

The Hotel building at Old Point is elegant and commodious, and has been recently transferred to new proprietors who have made, we learn, every arrangement for the comfort of guests during the current season.

But we fancy our readers crying out again, 'let us have, oh worthy tourist, some account of scenery in the other Southern States. Quousque tandem abutere, Nuncius, patientia nostra! How long will you detain us, Mr, Messenger, in Virginia?' Not a moment more.

We turn now

"Pursuing his course in this region, the traveller latter otherwise called the Devil's Court Housegets glimpses of Bald and Whiteside Moutain-the a granite cliff, smooth faced for half a mile, and twelve hundred feet high.-the very sight from which makes the head swim and the heart sink. By passing over a span of rock, but two feet in reach a cave in the summit of this mountain; an width, which overhangs the precipice, you may enterprise of so much peril, so well calculated to inspire awe and trepidation, that but one man was ever known to undertake it. His perils, on the occasion, did not arise merely from the narrowness of his bridge-one which reminds us of Al Sirat, the Muslim bridge to Paradise. When to the next state in geographical order. And, approaching the mouth of the cave, our explorer here, let us say that we shall be compelled to encountered a huge bear just making from it. avail ourselves fully to the end of this paper, of Fortunately, the surprise of the bear was quite the labours of our friend in the Southern Quar- as great as his own; the animal being so startled terly Review, whose pleasant and gracefully-at such unusual invasion, that he leapt the preciwritten article we have read with great satisfac-pice and was dashed to pieces; but the man was so much terrified at the danger he had escaped, tion. This worthy gentleman, whom we take as to be compelled to remain some hours before to be none other than the editor, has journeyed he could so quiet his nerves as to venture his reextensively in the higher regions of North and turn." South Carolina, as we have not, and he has depicted the beauties of those regions with a freedom and graphic power of pencil beyond our humble attainment, even if we had.

The chief difficulty under which North Carolina labours in respect of her highland country, is the want of lines of improvement by which it might be made accessible. She presents almost as wide a field to the summer traveller as Virginia; her ridges are as healthful, her springs are perhaps less efficacious and generally known but will be found of great virtue, and there are points of view as remarkable within her limits as any we have glanced at. The proper way to visit this section, at present, the Quarterly Reviewer suggests, is on horseback. A pedestrian excursion, from the nearest town, of half-a-dozen good fellows, with conveyance for baggage and ammunition (and much may be embraced in this latter substantive) would not be a bad notion, The advantage of this mode of travel is its entire independence. No compulsion to rise at a particular hour for the stage-coach cuts short your morning nap, you are not annoyed with those self-important fellow-passengers who are constantly reminding the driver that he carries Cæsar and his fortunes, but are free to move at your own hours and to halt when you come upon a suitable resting place, to pitch your tent where'er you please and there to make your bome.

River through the mountains is thus poetically The passage of the French Broad or Tselica described by the Reviewer.

"We shall never forget, though we should be quite unable to describe the effect made upon ourselves, the first sights and sounds of this sub

lime passage. We travelled by night from Ashereached the river, along whose margin thence ville, on the route to the Warm Springs. We the road proceeds, about the dawn of day. In the vague and misty twilight, the first flashings of the foaming torrent rose in sight, and as the opposite shores could not be distinguished at that early hour. and in consequence of the heavy mist which overhung them, the illusion was perfect which persuaded us that we were once more on the borders of the great Atlantic Sea. These curling, flashing, white billows, reeking up and rolling over, and wallowing one after another, upon the shore, were the combing surfs upon our The illusandy islets along the eastern coast. sion was wonderfully aided by the deep and solemn roar of the perpetually chiding billows. They were the identical voices of the sea that we heard-as if these themselves were not properly natives of the deep, but mountain voices, torn away from their proper homes, and perpetually wailing their exode in a chaunt which is mournful enough to be that of exile. It was only in the full breadth of day that we could scan the boundaries beyond, and justly appreciate the wild grandeur of the route along which we sped. Our road, an excellent one for the mountains, is cut out along the very margin of the river. Occasionally, there is no ledge to protect you from The Quarterly Reviewer, in following Mr. the steep. The track does not often admit of Lanman (apropos of his Letters from the Alle-two carriages abreast; and huge, immovable

boulders sometimes contract, to the narrowest magnesia and salts. At Glenn's Springs you measures, the pathway for the single one. You will make the acquaintance of the gentry of the wind along the precipice with a perpetual sense middle and upper country generally, with a slight of danger, which increases the sublimity of the sprinkling of others from the sea-board. The scene. The river, meanwhile, boils, and bounds, former are here in considerable numbers throughand rages at your feet, tossing in strong writhings out the season. You will find them equally courover the fractured masses of the rock, plunging teous, intelligent and frank; easy in their manheadlong, with a groan, into great cavities be- ners, and prompt and graceful in their hospitali tween, now fretting over a long line of barrier ties From this point the transition is easy to masses, now leaping, with a surging hiss, down Spartanburg, a region of perfect health throughsudden steppes, which it approaches unprepared. out, lying beautifully for farming, and remarkaBeyond you note the perpendicular heights, stern, bly well settled. Here you find other medicinal dark, jagged, impending, a thousand feet in air. waters, the Cedar, the Pacolet. Limestone and You find yourself suddenly in a cavernous ave- Sulphur Springs, each of which has its advonue; look up, and behold an enormous boulder, cates, though their visitors are much less numerthrust out from the mountain sides, hanging ous than those of Glenn's. The Pacolet, and completely over you like a mighty atlantean roof, other falls and rapids, are objects of great curibut such a roof as threatens momently to topple osity; and the famous battle-field of the Cowdown in storm and thunder on your head. And pens affords a point of great attraction to him thus, with a sense keenly alive to the startling who loves to seek out the memorials of the Revaspects in the forms around you, the superior olution. But, if the object be mountain scenery, grandeur of the heights, the proof which they the traveller will speed for Greenville, which lies everywhere present that the volcano and the tor-adjoining, to the north and west. The village rent have but recently done their work of con- of this name is a beauty among villages, and its vulsion and revolution, you hurry on for miles, cascade of Reedy River, which skirts the settlerelieved occasionally by scenes of a strangely ment, affords numerous subjects for the painter. sweet beauty in the stream;-when the waters In the northeast angle of the district, however, subside to calm; when they no longer hiss, and you find bolder pictures, where the beautiful boil, and rage, and roar, in conflict with the blends with the sublime, and informs the imagimasses whose bonds they have broken; and nation with images at once of the stupendous when, leaping away into an even and unruffled and the sweet. The Hogback Mountain, a cragflow, they seem to sleep in lakes whose edges ged and perilous ascent, that might find a more bear fringes of flowery vines, and the loveliest suitable name, is the first of a lordly brotherhood floral tangles, from which you may pluck at sea- of heights, which enshrine a thousand scenes of sous the purplest berries, drooping to the very the terrible and lovely. Adjoining it you have lips of the waters. Sometimes, these seeming the Glassy Mountain, so named because of the lakes gather about the prettiest islets, such as glazed beauty of its rocky sides, trickling with prompt you to fancy abodes such as the English perpetual water, in the sunlight. The waters fairies delighted to explore, and where, indeed. which flow from these mountains form the sourthe Cherokee has placed a class of spirits, with ces of the Tyger and the Pacolet. Here, also, strange mysterious powers, who were acknowl- you have the Saluda and Panther Mountains, edged to maintain a singular influence over the and, above all, the wonderful rocky cliff and prered man's destinies. A landscape painter, of cipice of Cæsar's Head-a name given to it from real talent. would find along the two great stems a remarkable profile, which, at one view, the of the French Broad, or Tselica, a thousand pic-crag presents, of a human, which might be a tures, far superior to any thing which Yankee Roman, face. Sachem's Head would be much mauufacture has ever yet gathered from the banks of the Hudson, or the groups of the Cats

kill."

Changing his ground into South Carolina, where his foot rests on its native hills, the Reviewer pleasantly continues to point out the natural charms of the country. We shall quote at length his glowing account of what may be seen

there.

more appropriate to the aboriginal locality, as the profile is quite as proper to the Indian as the Roman type of face. As the name of the Indian priest in the Southern States was Iawa, this title would seem a not inappropriate one to the stern, prophet-like image which this rock affords. The mountain itself is an eutire mass of granite, rising abruptly from the valley, through which a turbulent river hurries upon its way. From the precipice, on this quarter, you have one of the most magnificent prospects that the world can show. Standing upon the edge of "We speed to Greenville, Spartanburg or the cliff, your eye courses, without impediment, Peudleton, points from which you may diverge to the full extent of its vision, leaving still reto a thousand spots of a scenery not surpassed gions beyond, which the fancy spreads out illimin any of the sister States. On your route you itably beneath your feet. Apart from the subpause at Glenn's Springs, one of the most fash-lime emotions of such a scene, from such a spot, ionable of the watering places of South-Caro- the sense of danger is enlivened when you dislina. These Springs belong to the same family. cover that the mountain rises from a base seemthe members of which are scattered throughout ingly quite too slender for its support, while an all the South, in parallel regions, from Virginia to Mississippi. They possess the same g neral characteristics, and are probably equally medicinal, being impregnated more or less with sulphur,

awful fissure divides the mass from top to bottom, detaching an immense mass, that threatens momently to go down in thunder upon the unconscious valley. The Head of Cæsar, or the

Iawa, is in some peril of serious abrasion, if not communes with the Glassy and Hogback Moundemolition, in the progress of events. tains, in Greenville; sweeping over SpartansBut, Pendleton is the district of South-Caro-burg, to the east, it rests on King's Mountain, lina most affluent in curiosities of this descrip- famous for the defeat of Ferguson, in the Revotion. The Table Rock is one of the Apalachian lution; next, in quick succession, you range from range. It rears its colossal front of granite-an the Saluda Mountains to the Panther, Cæsar's isolated mass, perpendicular as a wall-more Head, the Dismal, the Estato and Oolenoe; and than eleven hundred feet in height, with a naked with the eye thus travelling west, you grasp the face of more than six hundred feet. The preci- castellated heights of the Currahee, in Georgia." pice is on the eastern side. It is ascended, on this side, by means of a ladder or steps of wood, We regret that our limits will allow us to make fastened with iron clamps to the stone, and with but one other quotation, the more so as this is several stagings compassing the perpendicular all we can give of the mountain region of Georheight. You literally hang in air. You look gia, a sister state that abounds in romantic and down, with a shudder, upon the awful chasm a

You

have visited them.

notes, with a sudden and sparkling overflowwildly quick, but rarely temperate; eager and full of impulse, yet chastened by the exquisite method of a grace and tenderness which prevail throughout the picture.

A few miles from Tuccoah is another scene, in rich and absolute contrast with it. If Tuccoah is the beautiful, Tallulah is the terrible !

thousand feet below. Your ladder shakes-its picturesque objects. The passage refers to the steps are in decay-occasionally one has disap-famous cataracts so highly eulogized by all who peared-and your heart sinks momentarily, rendering necessary the encouragement of your "Tuccoah is, indeed, a mountain beauty of guide. The great black wall glistens with the descending streams, which the sun coins into rare loveliness. The cascade falls in a sheet most brilliants as fast as they scatter into spray. Go like a thin gauzy veil, through which sparkles a below--look up-and your soul rises with the galaxy of little brilliants. It is the emblem of majesty of prayer. On the western side, a equal purity and beauty. Its adjuncts are all of stream darts away, headlong, with great speed- the same character. Beauty, rather than granas a doe pursued by the hunters, whom you may deur, is the word by which to describe it, though fancy you see in the five cascades which bound the latter element is not wanting to its charms. off, from as many quarters, on a like course, all It is only held in subjection to the superior sweetstriving equally for the Oolenoe, one of the tribu-ness of its fascination. Tuccoah is a lyric to the taries of the Saluda, in which they are all finally eye. It is a single outgushing of fond musical lost. But, the chase is continued daily. There is still a doe to fly, and still as many hunters to pursue. The mountain, on this side, is well wooded, and is thus in remarkable contrast with the naked wall of rock in the opposite quarter. You gain the top of the rock, and find a rude square or platform. The wonders increase around you. Here is another rock, which is the giant's stool, as the mountain is his table. may fancy a dinner party of Gog and Magog, and, if you sleep and dream, may conjure up images of a feast, where your chance is to be eaten last, unless, like Ulysses, you can succeed in couching the eye of your feeder. Your fancies will be greatly helped by the proofs around you of unknown races. You are shown the tracks of gigantic feet, beasts, birds and men, which may be those of elephant or tortoise both are insisted upon-or the result of the natural attrition of water in the rock, which you may find it quite as pleasant to believe. Passing to the verge of the precipice, you feel, with Natty Bumppo, that you see creation. A cedar tree, for years, was the terminus, beyond which no It grew in a crevice of the rock, and overhung the precipice. It was the ordinary trial of the adventurer's courage to clasp this tree in his embrace, and swing over the chasm. But, the tree perished, finally, and the feat is performed no longer. You sit and gaze; but it will require some time before the eye opens fully upon its And now we ask if there is not enough of possessions. To the north and east, your view is bounded by the Alleghanies, of which the rock beautiful and grand scenery in the South to enupon which you recline is one of the barrier list the attention of Southern tourists? Has not mountains. On all other sides, Nature seems nature arrayed herself here, in a garb sufficiently happily to repose in the embrace of Beauty. Vale and field, and river and cascade, and lonely attractive to the eye that loves her, that it peaks of kindred granite, employ and persuade must wander off annually to districts in no degree the satisfied glance from side to side. Your eye more picturesque in search of glad sights?

foot was set.

VOL. XVII-49

"If Tuccoah is the lyric of water-falls, Tallulah is the grand five act drama, the sublime and awful tragedy, scene upon scene, accumulating with new interest, until the repose of death overspreads the catastrophe. It so happens that Tallulah is a series of cascades, five in number, with a pause between each, in which the waters, exhausted apparently by previous conflict, rest themselves before resuming their fearful progress to new struggles. These rests afford you glimpses of the sweetest repose. The stream seems momently to sleep, and, in such lovely lakelets, that you almost look to see the naiad Princess emerging from the surrounding caves, with loosened tresses, preparing for the bath. The next progress increases the action and the interest of the scene, until. at the close, you see only the convulsive forms below you, writhing as if in death, and hear the deep groans of their pauting agony, sent up to you in an appeal that seems to ask for sympathy and vengeance."

Editor's Cable.

To such as design visiting Virginia during the hot months of 1851, we cannot too highly commend Dr. Burke's Volume. The invalid will find it an invaluable vade mecum, and it will be useful to the strong man in guarding him against an improper use of the waters and furnishing him with practical hints as to the enjoyment of We think it a note-worthy fact that on the fifth the bath. The season will soon open, and those day of May, a date memorable as the anniverfortunate people who have three months to be sary of the death of Napoleon, we had a fall of idle, will commence idleness for three months. snow as far South as our own city. The old To one and all we offer a Virginia welcome. figure of the poet, so frequently quoted, of win- \ For the sick who visit the Springs for health and ter chilling the lap of May, has thus received strength, we invoke the choicest benisons of another illustration. Indeed, during many years Hygeia. For those whose pursuit is relaxation past, a change has been observed in the temperof spirits we ask the most gracious patronage of ature of our winters, that, if continued, may inthat

goddess fair and free,

In Heaven yclep'd Euphrosyne.

duce some change in the nomenclature of the months. If the fantastic folly of the French, which gave epithets by way of title to these di

The long

We have endeavored to give them some fore-visions of time, should ever again prevail, they shadowing of what they may expect in coming. certainly could not call May Floreal. It might And now they have only to lay the map before be better designated as Brumaire. them, and mark out the route that each one shall prefer. The State is all before them where to choose their place of rest, and Dr. Burke their guide.

A SONG OF IRELAND.

A health to the Isle that, though trampled in scorn
By the merciless minions of power,
May rise from the dust with a grandeur new-born.
And shatter her chains in an hour:

A voice from the graves that the Tyrant hath filled
Cannot always be pleading unheard;
And the whirlwind of wrath, though for centuries stilled,
May burst from repose at a word.

'Mid the tempest of strife and the tumult of wrong,
How many bright names gild the gloom,

The monarchs of speech and the masters of song,
A halo of life, 'round the tomb;

These names cannot die, for the nation's great heart,
Hath enshrined them, the deeper in ill-

Let the last blow be struck and the last hope depart-
She will cling to them faithfully still.

O! Erin! the world has been cold to thy doom!
Few flowers have been strewn on thy bier-
And the pride of thy glory and blush of thy bloom
Have passed, without blessing or prayer:
Yet across the wild waves may the desolate son
Of thy blighted dominions find rest,
And a haven of peace for the Exile be won,
In the fetterless homes of the West.

O! still we will trust, a New Era may rise,
On the fair Isle of Emmett and Moore,

When a true light shall burn in her long-clouded skies,
And the night of her mourning be o'er:

A health to her now, and a health to her then-
And death to oppression's stern sway-
The West hath the hearts of a million of men,
That will pray for her triumph that day.

P. H. H.

season in May, known among the Germans as the season of the Severe Masters, has always been one of rain and cold, but rarely of frost. A story yet survives, however, of Frederick the Great, that one sunny, leafy, genial May-day, he ordered the exotics of his conservatory to be brought out into the open air, despite the advice of his head-gardener, who warned him of the Severe Masters, Saints Mammertus, Germanus and Servatius, (supposed to preside over the 11th, 12th and 13th days of the month); by which the whole orangery of Potsdam, one of the finest in Europe, was cut off.

Our correspondent X. Y. Z., whose account of a ghostly meeting in the African Church of our city, we published last month, writes us as follows

Mr. Thompson,

I observe in a late number of the Richmond Republican a card from the "Reporter to the Convention," who takes me to task good-humoredly for a passage in the speech of the spectral orator, whom I chanced to hear, a few weeks since, addressing an assembly of goblins in the African Church. The Reporter conceives that the orator or myself has done him injustice in the use of the terms "new-fangled" and "villainous" as applied to the Fonetic system of reporting. I might demur to this by submitting that while injustice may have been done to the system itself by the use of these epithets, none could by possibility have been done the reporter. But as the latter adjective is capable of an interpretation that would reflect discredit upon him, (as he who follows a villainous' calling, in the offensive sense of the word, can hardly be a proper man,) I will raise no such distinction. First, then as to 'new-fangled.' "Verbatim reporting" says he, so far from being 'new-fangled,' I had supposed to be almost as ancient as the gift of oratory itself." Now I was, indeed, aware that the art of writing in short-hand was as old as the Greeks and Romans, as allusions to the

that the Fonetic system (to which the objectionable phrase

notarii or stenographers are plentifully sprinkled through those happy people who rejoice in the holy esthe writings of those pleasant old fellows, Pliny, Martial, tate of matrimony? We are willing to believe and Quintilian, but I was certainly under the impression that the arrangements for married guests at the was applied by the spirit) was of very recent date and Charleston Hotel are all that could be desired, that its proficients claimed for it the credit of being the only system by which a strictly verbatim report of a speech could be made.

but so far as we were concerned, that department of the establishment might have been in Calcutta or at the North Pole. It was terra inSecondly, as to 'villainous.' I have no hesitation cognita to us. As to the rooms, there is in every whatever in saying that this word was not designed to impute to the Reporter any wickedness or depravity by large hotel a district to us of most mysterious virtue of his exercising the craft so branded. It was used character. It lies on the 2nd and 3rd floors in simply in its Shaksperean sense as 'mischievous,' and as front. We see windows from the outside and

such it may not be difficult to defend the application.

The Reporter says that the new system seeks to present a fac simile of the speaker. Sir, is this desirable? Are we to be deluged with the nonsense of every Orator Pop in the land even down to the fatal absurdity of his commas? And if the old system made speeches decent, before they were put in the newspaper to take away our appetites for breakfast, is it not better to go back to it at once? And yet the Reporter, even while claiming for the Fonetic system that it alone, of all modes of reporting, makes an exact transcript of a speaker's remarks, says that verbatim reporting is as old as the gift of oratory itself.

doors opening upon the passage within, indications that induce us to suppose that in this region there may be commodious and airy rooms, (such as are spoken of in the advertisements,) but we could not make affidavit of the fact, and we are inclined on the whole to doubt it. Perhaps one of these days we may learn more about this unexplored territory. But now, whenever we present ourselves for entertainment at the office of a "first class hotel," we are considered merely I am glad to see, Mr. Thompson, that the Reporter disclaims any affiliation with the Vandals of the "Fonetic as candidates for the attic and for the chanceNuz." I have not the pleasure of the Reporter's perso- medley of the Gentleman's Ordinary. It was so nal acquaintance but I have taken a liking to him from at the Charleston Hotel. Of course it is of the the galleries. He has borne the protracted and acute smallest possible consequence to the public, how agonies of the Debate upon the Basis with a fortitude so we-a poor devil of an editor-fared at any parheroic and uncomplaining that I confess I look upon him as I would have looked upon Silvio Pellico when he ticular place or time, but we stand up for the came out from the Austrian dungeon to the light of day, rights of bachelors. They are a much-abused, or as one might regard any other illustrious person who though a large and important fraternity, and the has submitted unmurmuringly to the cruelties of despotic system of snubbing' them at the hotels, in power. The whole convention has been his Emperor Charlestou or elsewhere, needs reform. It was Francis and his sufferings have been indeed very fearful.

Feeling this interest in him, I rejoice that he agrees with the orator in repudiating the Fonetic orthography. It is gratifying to know that he would not spell effects, FX., or seedy, CD.

I have written this explanation, because I consider myself responsible, in the silence of the eloquent ghost, for anything contained in my report of his harangue. If I have made myself understood, very well; if not, I must sign myself, (with compliments to the Reporter), what the Fonetic gentlemen would make me, an

EX-WISE-HEAD.
(X. Y. Z.)

from this conviction alone that we felt it our duty to speak out with regard to our experience at this much lauded hostelrie,' for which the News takes up the cudgels.

We derive very constant amusement from our files of the California newspapers. There is a freshness in the advertisements and the "items of news" that we like very much. It is curious to observe, also, how the usages and customs of older communities are gradually iutroduced into this new country, which has been peopled with a rapidity so unexampled. They have the Italian Opera, already, at San Francisco, and Norma and Ernani are advertised among the representations. It is strange indeed that such a 'fast' population have not had the latest European dance. Pray, what dance is it, that is referred to, in the following card?

Our friend Richards of the Southern Literary Gazette refers, in a recent number of his paper, to an article in the Evening News, drawn forth by some unfavorable comments, made in our "Notes of a Southern Excursion," upon the Charleston Hotel. We regret that we did not see the News containing the article in question. The editor thinks, and Mr. Richards endorses the opinion, that we fared so badly, in conseDANCERS WANTED.-It is supposed that quence of our desolate and miserable condition among the many Europeans who have landed on our of bachelorhood. We consider this very proba-shores within the last few months, some of them must be ble. But are bachelors placed so far out of the acquainted with that very exciting, beautiful, and truly pale of humanity by our Charleston friends, as not to deserve any consideration at all? Or are hotels built only with reference to the comfort of

mind in the North of Europe for a year past, and which has not as yet ever been introduced into this country. Should there be any such persons in the city, eight or ten

pleasing dance, which has attracted so much the public