Spring is coming!
Yes, its blue skies are over us—its soft breezes shall fan us—the fragrance of its myriad flowers be wafted to us. Its mossy carpet shall be spread for our careless feet—our languid limbs shall be laved at its cool fountains. Its luscious fruits shall send health through our leaping veins—while from mountain top, and wooded hill, and flower-wreathed valley, shall float one glad anthem of praise from tiniest feathered throats!
Dear reader! From that human heart of thine shall no burst of grateful thanks arise to Him who giveth all? While nature adores—shall man be dumb? God forbid!
STEAMBOAT SIGHTS AND REFLECTIONS.
I am looking, from the steamer’s deck, upon as fair a sunrise as ever poet sang or painter sketched, or the earth ever saw. Oh, this broad, blue, rushing river! sentineled by these grand old hills, amid which the silvery mist wreaths playfully; half shrouding the little eyrie homes, where love wings the uncounted hours; while looming up in the hazy distance, is the Babel city, with glittering spires and burnished panes—one vast illumination. My greedy eye with miserly eagerness devours it all, and hangs it up in Memory’s cabinet, a fadeless picture; upon which dame Fortune (the jilt) shall never have a mortgage.
Do you see yonder figure leaning over the railing of the boat, gazing on all this outspread wealth of beauty? One longs to hear his lips give utterance to the burning thoughts which cause his eye to kindle and his face to glow. A wiry sister, (whose name should be “Martha,” so careful, so troubled looks her spinstership,) breaks the charmed spell by asking him, in a cracked treble, “if them porters on the pier can be safely trusted with her bandbox and umberil.” My stranger eyes meet his, and we both laugh involuntarily—(pardon us, oh ye prim ones)—without an introduction!
Close at my elbow sits a rough countryman, with so much “free soil” adhering to his brogans they might have been used for beet-beds, and a beard rivaled only by Nebuchadnezzar’s when he experimented on a grass diet. He has only one word to express his overpowering emotions at the glowing panorama before us, and that is “pooty,”—houses, trees, sky, rafts, railroad cars and river, all are “pooty;” and when, in the fulness of a soul craving sympathy, he turned to his dairy-fed Eve to endorse it, that matter-of-fact feminine shower-bath-ed his enthusiasm, by snarling out “pooty enough, I’spose, but where’s my breakfast?”