AMERICAN SCENERY.
William Tudor, an American littérateur. Born at Boston in 1779; died, 1830.
Our numerous waterfalls and the enchanting beauty of our lakes afford many objects of the most picturesque character; while the inland seas, from Superior to Ontario, and that astounding cataract, whose roar would hardly be increased by the united murmurs of all the cascades of Europe, are calculated to inspire vast and sublime conceptions. The effects, too, of our climate, composed of a Siberian winter and an Italian summer, furnish new and peculiar objects for description. The circumstances of remote regions are here blended, and strikingly opposite appearances witnessed, in the same spot, at different seasons of the year. In our winters, we have the sun at the same altitude as in Italy, shining on an unlimited surface of snow, which can only be found in the higher latitudes of Europe, where the sun, in the winter, rises little above the horizon. The dazzling brilliancy of a winter's day and a moonlight night, in an atmosphere astonishingly clear and frosty, when the utmost splendor of the sky is reflected from a surface of spotless white, attended with the most excessive cold, is peculiar to the northern part of the United States. What, too, can surpass the celestial purity and transparency of the atmosphere in a fine autumnal day, when our vision and our thought seem carried to the third heaven; the gorgeous magnificence of the close, when the sun sinks from our view, surrounded with various masses of clouds, fringed with gold and purple, and reflecting, in evanescent tints, all the hues of the rainbow.
LIBERTY HAS A CONTINENT OF HER OWN.
Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Oxford, a famous English literary gossip, amateur, and wit. Born in London, October, 1717; died, March, 1797.
Liberty has still a continent to exist in.
LOVE OF AMERICA.
Daniel Webster, the celebrated American statesman, jurist, and orator. Born at Salisbury, N. H., January 18, 1782; died at Marshfield, Mass., October 24, 1852.
I profess to feel a strong attachment to the liberty of the United States; to the constitution and free institutions of the United States; to the honor, and I may say the glory, of this great Government and great country.
I feel every injury inflicted upon this country almost as a personal injury. I blush for every fault which I think I see committed in its public councils as if they were faults or mistakes of my own.