第68章 Some Imported Articles(1)

WE met two steamboats at New Madrid.Two steamboats in sight at once!an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi.

The loneliness of this solemn,stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing.League after league,and still league after league,it pours its chocolate tide along,between its solid forest walls,its almost untenanted shores,with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank,watery solitude;and so the day goes,the night comes,and again the day--and still the same,night after night and day after day--majestic,unchanging sameness of serenity,repose,tranquillity,lethargy,vacancy--symbol of eternity,realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet,and longed for by the good and thoughtless!

Immediately after the war of 1812,tourists began to come to America,from England;scattering ones at first,then a sort of procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding,patient march through the land during many,many years.

Each tourist took notes,and went home and published a book--a book which was usually calm,truthful,reasonable,kind;but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors.

A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it,but remains to-day about as it was then.

The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern,of course;they HADto be various,along at first,because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their emotions,whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors.

And,mind you,emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth;it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.Captain Basil Hall.

R.N.,writing fifty-five years ago,says--

'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to behold,and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble I had experienced in coming so far;and stood looking at the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything.

But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times,that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.'

Following are Mrs.Trollope's emotions.She is writing a few months later in the same year,1827,and is coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi--'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters,and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf.I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi.

Had Dante seen it,he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from its horrors.One only object rears itself above the eddying waters;this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar,and it still stands,a dismal witness of the destruction that has been,and a boding prophet of that which is to come.'

Emotions of Hon.Charles Augustus Murray (near St.Louis),seven years later--'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred miles,and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature,that you begin to understand all his might and majesty.

You see him fertilizing a boundless valley,bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth,and there forming islands,destined at some future period to be the residence of man;and while indulging in this prospect,it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles,and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination.'

Receive,now,the emotions of Captain Marryat,R.N.author of the sea tales,writing in 1837,three years after Mr.Murray--'Never,perhaps,in the records of nations,was there an instance of a century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi.

The stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed.It is not like most rivers,beautiful to the sight,bestowing fertility in its course;not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along,nor can you wander upon its banks,or trust yourself without danger to its stream.