And when the mountains are past, there is no low-lying fat Bedford level, to fatigue the eye; but the country is rounded into sweeping, irregular hillocks of green, whose sides are hoary with old wood, or verdant with the richest of springing grain crops. And in the bosoms of such hills, where the flow of water finds outlet, bright brooks silver the rounded mountains, and cover the earth into fragmentary lapses of meadow that tax the mower with the luxuriance of their grasses.
If the reader has ever loitered among the green hill-slopes of Northern Devonshire, he may form therefrom a just, though a miniature idea of those green billows of land, which drop the Allegheny heights to the borders of the Ohio.
And as for that far-western stream, which the French called, with a fitness of calling which we rarely cherish, la belle rivière—its banks are all a wonder, and its islands floating wonders. The time is not far away when the loiterers of the civilized world who have not drank in the beauties that hedge the Ohio banks, and mirror themselves in the placid Ohio water, will be behind their profession.
The Rhine and the Hudson have each their beauties; and so has Lake George, with its black mountain lying gaunt upon the water: but the Ohio, with its bordering hills, fat and fertile to their very summits—various in outline as are summer shadows—and with its rich drooping foliage, touching the water, and its islands seeming to float in the stillness—and its bordering towns of modest houses sprinkling the banks and dotting the alluvial edge, and all mirrored, as clearly as your face in your morning glass, upon the bright steel surface that shines through a thousand miles of country—is worthy of as honorable mention as any river that flows.
We see, in no very distant future, the time when Pittsburgh packets will show companies of pleasure-seekers, who will luxuriate in the picturesqueness of the Kentucky and Ohio shores, as they now luxuriate along the Hudson or the Rhine.
The time is coming, too—gliding now upon our clairvoyant vision, as we sit in our office solitude—when legends of early war, and Indian chieftain, and poor Blennerhasset, and border settlements, shall spring up under artist pen, and crown the graceful mountains, that swoop right and left from the Ohio voyager, with charming historic beauty.
We have forgotten thus far that foreign chit-chat which has usually fallen under our pen. Yet, with what spirit, can we speak of foreign gayety when the scheming tyrant of the day is forcing even festivity under the prick of his army bayonets, and winning willingness to his power, by debauching thought, and making joy drunk with lewdness?
The honest American is no way bound to keep temper with such action as assails the principles he holds most dear—least of all at the hands of a man who gains his force by no poor right of prescription or inheritance, but only by usurpation.
Belgium, they tell us, is full of runaways from the autocrat of the army; and a poor exiled gayety makes glad the hearts of thousands of refugees.