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 HAD to 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.
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