I will love thee, Mary, for thine own
And for New-England’s sake.
M. E. Hewitt.
ON RIVERS AND OTHER THINGS.
If I were as tedious as a King, I could find in my heart to bestow it all on your worship.
Shaks.
It is a comfort still remaining to me, to reflect, that after all the evil that the Tourists, the Reviewers and the Satirists of England together have said and done and imagined of America, they have never yet annihilated our Lakes; dispossessed us of our Rivers; disproved our Waterfalls; nor made bitter to us, our fountains and streams and brooks and water-courses. I thank God with a full heart that from whatever cause these still abide unchanged among us; still flow, still control the ear with the majesty of sound, and make glad the solitary places of the heart.
It is not often indeed that they admit the existence of these objects in set terms; nor introduce into their works a paragraph upon the subject: nor would any one who had never visited America be expressly informed perhaps by them, that our part of the world contained within its compass any thing at all comparable in the way of Rivers to the Thames or the Tweed; or to the ponds of Cumberland in the way of Lakes; or to the Pisse Vache in Switzerland in the way of a fall of water: but yet they have not deprived us of them; and, incidentally, when they sometimes mention their having been shockingly annoyed and incommoded by a scrub, who spat several times upon the floor of the steamer in their presence, during a trip of three hundred, five hundred or a thousand miles that they have had the mishap to make with him, (instead of using his stomach like a true born Englishman, or his parti-coloured flag of abomination like a continental personage,) they give the reader some idea of the scope of a River or of a Lake in America. Or, when they note down that a parcel of knaves, with sterling money of the realm of Great Britain, borrowed doubtless for the purpose and, as they verily believe, never repaid to this hour, bought a merchant ship; loaded her with every variety of live animals like an ark, and then cruelly and nefariously precipitated her over the Falls of Niagara, in order to gratify that national tendency for a great Splash, which exists universally in every form throughout the whole of that wretched experiment at self-government called the United States—they then give the untravelled reader some conception of an American Fall of Water. One may therefore with confidence write down in a grave Essay like this, and expect it to be believed even by those who have not Morse’s Geography before their eyes, that there still is, and long has been, a fall of Water by common courtesy distinguished as The Cataract of Niagara; and a river in the State of Connecticut, called, without any of our ‘usual’ cisatlantic inflation, Connecticut River.
I pass over all further preliminary matter, and proceed at once to state, that the steamer which leaves New-York in the course of the afternoon, enters, during the night, the long and tranquil expanse of water known by the name of the Connecticut; and that when the passengers, after a quiet night’s rest, assemble upon decks that are moist with dew in the bright, still, cheery morning of the early summer, they are gliding onward far up that river, cutting its glassy bosom in the direction of the rays of the rising Sun; the overpowering lustre of which is diminished by a soft and precious Claude-like haze that hangs like a gauze of gossamer on the borders of their way, a bridal veil just being lifted by the Sun; tempering while it enriches the gilding of the shores, the waters, the far-off spire, the contented farmer’s house and barns, the unfrequent trees, the cattle gazing at the approaching object, the sail you are overtaking or meeting, and often, the fisherman, seen in the distance, standing in his boat on the margin of the river, in his white shirt-sleeves, waiting the passage of the steamer.