tainment. The arts and sciences will be cultivated to the utmost limit of perfection, and will here unfold all their brilliant evidences of utility and grandeur. They are already transplanted hither, and are taking deep root; and farther time, with the multiplied population that will soon throng those extensive borders, will carry them to rapid maturity. The pure religion of the Sun of Righteousness will follow close in the train, and even now holds a powerful and happy sway. It will not be less ennobling in its effects, than gratifying to those who are pure in heart; spreading its glorious mantle over all the sons and daughters who profess its faith, and giving the light and consolation of the gospel to every inhabitant.

Among the numerous advantages and attractions which entice the enterprising adventurer to a land so favored, will be found one of a prominent and important character. It forms a peculiar feature, having nothing corresponding to it in any other section of the globe. This relates to the splendid rivers which are almost without number, and which, for thousands of miles, fertilize and beautify it, in every direction. Notwithstanding the length of these rivers, and the immeasurable floods of water they discharge, I have never been able to learn that in any instance does the largest and longest of them exceed in any one place a mile and a half in breadth. Even this is very rare; for the mighty Mississippi itself, in its average width, is not over three quarters of a mile. Few of the other rivers exceed half a mile, and most of them are considerably less. So uniform are they in this particular, and so gentle are their general currents, that they are rendered navigable by steam-boats almost to their sources.

Who does not perceive in all this the evidences of kindness and benignity? Who does not see the clear marks of exalted wisdom and unbounded liberality? Who does not comprehend, that in the uniform narrowness and gentleness of these noble rivers, are found increased conveniences, and an essential diminution of dangers? Without these clearly-defined advantages, much of their utility, which is every where the leading attribute in the works of nature, would have been lost. But the whole is formed, as it would seem, with the express view to the accommodation of a people who should have a safe and easy intercourse with each other; whose rational enjoyments should be extensively multiplied; and who should be zealously devoted to the noblest and most useful pursuits.

Another strongly-marked characteristic of this vast domain, is visible in its general smooth and level surface, surpassing in this respect probably all other countries. Its fair face is no where disfigured by lofty, shaggy, and broken ridges; there are no sandy plains, of interminable length; no unfathomable, yawning, and impassable gulfs, restricting intercourse, and multiplying difficulties; nor any other insurmountable obstacles. It is therefore singularly adapted to the construction of those noblest monuments of a free people, commodious rail-roads and canals, those eminently useful channels of easy, cheap, and rapid communication.

The fertility of the country is proverbial, and its climate is known to be mild and salubrious. Its productions are most abundant, and infinitely varied. This necessarily results from its prodigious extent, reaching, as it does, almost from the torrid to the extreme of

the frigid zone-from the soft cotton and sugar clime of the south, to the dreary and inhospitable ranges of the reindeer and polar bear of the north.

The geological attributes are in many respects extraordinary. Minerals of the most useful kinds, and without limit, are known to abound; more particularly coal, iron, lead, copper, etc. Woods, of almost every variety, and of unsurpassed beauty; marble, of various kinds, some of which is exquisitely variegated; and the coarser but more useful articles of granite, freestone, limestone, and all other materials, designed for the ordinary use and comfort of the human family, are liberally spread in every direction, through those teeming and highly favored abodes.

How glad they leaped, those frolic waves, at morn,
To catch the sunbeams mirthfully upspringing,

Like merry sprites, disporting joyously;

The rocks all ringing to their jocund shouts,

To join their elfin revel urging me.

Afar, where blended dimly sea and sky,

Oft as I marked some out-bound, dashing ship,
Careering like a sea-bird on her way,
Some Nereid, floating on her silver shell,
Her bright hair streaming out upon the wind,
Seemed wreathing up her white arms to the cliff,
And forth my heart went with her o'er the wave.

Or when at evening, for a cooling draught,
The sun in ocean dipped his brazen shield;
And the loud waves came booming o'er the deep,
Tossing their crests as 't were against the sky,
And hurrying, charging, wildly on the beach,
A warlike band of Tritons seemed to advance,
Sounding, mid clash and din, their wreathéd shells.

New-York, May, 1838.

HORTUS SICCUS.

NUMBER ONE.

'Oh give me the moss-covered bucket again!'

WHEN people talk about change, and the fashion of changing, in this world of ours, it sounds trite enough. Ever and again some wanderer comes back to the spot whence he started in youth, and exclaims over what he sees, as if change were a new thing, and the people who have staid quietly at home, and seen the tide of affairs rising, day by day, to its new marks, are ready to laugh in his face for making such an ado over what seems to them so natural and easy, and in no wise surprising. But there is something in this hasty flitting of familiar things, that is worth exclaiming over; and particularly in some parts of our country the rapidity with which a change of aspect is effected, passes all history and experience, and even sober poetry. Those who live in the centre of a city, and pace over sidewalks, and along closely-built walls of houses, never see it; and the people of our country towns may still walk over the scarcely widened path that took them to school, and not see it; but suburbans, who have been trampled upon in the march of cities country-ward, can talk about change.

-,' says an officious little board

'Lots for sale: inquire of at the end of a long row of newly-planted stakes. What of that? Nothing, but that I remember here a stony lane, so steep that nothing passed over it but the rushing red clay waters, after a rain, or stumbling cows, hurried home from pasture, and I miss the gay barberry bushes that guarded its inaccessible sides. 'Paradise Row. Desirable lots for sale.' What of that? Nothing, but that to level it, they have smoothed the prettiest dimpled orchard that was ever moulded for a children's play-ground. Look where they have filled up the bowl,' down whose green sides the ripe apples rolled from the trees on the top, till they reached the huge heap in the centre, from which we made our selections! Is there any thing in the sight of the plough slowly scooping out furrows of red earth, or the man who, with folded arms, directs each time where the next course shall be run across, that I should stand and watch the process? Let me tell you something about that rough, rain-seamed hill they are taking down so coolly. The time has been when no one thought it defaced the fair earth's surface. As I stand looking at it now, the vision of what it was, hovers over it, some three feet elevated in air. But it is easy for my fancy to fit it with a foundation, and re-turf and re-plant it, till I can stand there again in the home of my childhood. Let me shape it out to you, if I can, with these few trees they have left, and the roads, (streets they are now,) which still run on each side, leaving it still a sightly corner place. If it were raised again, and the bank on the sunny south side had its original turfy but abrupt slope to the road, while a supporting stone wall, of six or eight feet height, surmounted by a white fence, curved around the corner, and ran along the eastern front, how easily we could open the gate, walk up the rustic stone steps, and take the

gravelled path to the door. Stop with me at the gate, and I will make them grow again, those goodly, smooth-barked cherry trees, in each high corner, guardians of the entrance. Often have the flat-heads of the gate-posts served as a platform to the branches, when they were looking black and heavy, as if a swarm of bees had lighted on them. These sentinel trees belonged to a range that stretched around both sides of the house, and their life was a part of mine. I counted time by their blossoming, and setting to fruit, and reddening, till the boughs were all stripped, and then I dated by the changes on the pear-tree. That patriarch harvest-pear tree! How has irreverence become the sin of a generation that could lay bare its aged roots! Here — no, there, it must have stood. Come under its broad shadow, and look up, as I used of a summer night, through its high branches, and see if you can tell which are stars and which are pears. What an influence that old tree exerted over us, even in our slumbers; for while the fruit lasted, who should be earliest under the tree, was the strife. Many a morning have my foot-prints been the first on the wet grass, that I might triumph over an apron full. Puritan fathers must have hung a spell upon its boughs, for now it is cut down, we sleep later. But the pears, the pears! and the grand shaking time! How they rolled down the slope of the yard, and over the fence into the road, and how we childishly gloried in the many great basketsfull! There was something of sublimity in such abundance, and of a fruit, too, that wanted nothing but juice and flavor!

Here was another veteran, the old plum-tree, in the low notch of which I used to sit, and call it my throne. Their stands, not to be mistaken, lopped and shorn as it is, the venerable apple-tree that bore the swing. What merry groups has that good-natured old tree thrown its shadow over, as if it loved romping and frolic! Time was when we held a circus there. Archie turning somersets, and Mink, the black cat, performing great jumping feats, while Ponto astonished a crowd of juveniles by more than canine sagacity. Up and down we swung, under a shower of apple blossoms sometimes taking a rough rub on the cheek from the bark of the sturdy old trunk. How we laughed, when the apples came down on our heads! Dearer yet was the still time, when I could sit there alone, and, gently swayed by the wind, as it were, give myself up to the enchantment of a story book. That was to be lapped in Elysium.'

Here stood the summer house, covered with a mysterious vine, that year after year baffled my penetration, setting thick with clusters that never came to fruit. That and the Magnumbonum tree, (that would drop all its great plums, touched by decay, after I had watched them swelling and swelling, and just putting on the purple,) I never could be friends with. Perhaps they were teaching me my first lessons of mortality, and the blasting of human hopes. They awed me beyond sociability.

But there, in that row of ragged gooseberry-bushes, is something with which the hens and I were familiar to gossiping, suffering ourselves to be scratched twice for every berry. It is strange that it should outlive so many worthier things, and be so green and thrifty yet. It shows where the garden fence ran. A gate opened here, and another there, and then the paths from each met, and joined company.

forward. The space between was a semi-circular flower-bed, the pride of the garden, bordered with the bright little strawberry rose, and filled with choice bulbs. An immense peony sat in the centre, to preside. Each side of the long walk was set with flowers and shrubs, carefully mated, aptly reminding us of that great original garden lesson, not good to be alone.'

I am dizzy with a rainbow in my head, when I recall all those flowers, as distinct and as dear to me then, as the friends I have found since. Here were the strawberry-beds. What a broken fence shuts off the road! Every picket was in its place once, and a hedge of currant bushes kept side by side with it for its whole length. I used to go and pick currants from the outside, to try to make them taste as they did to the little pilferers going home from school. But come out from the garden, for it sickens me to see nothing left of all but these old tufts of fleur-de-luce, and yellow lilies. Stop, let me gather one. Let us keep away from those ploughing people. We are safe here. All this was a mowing lot. Here we had our winter sliding course, and here our freaks, when the new boy sent Irish Thomas complaining to the mistress.' Here was the debatable ground, where we transacted all the wilder doings that might not be brought nearer the house, the scene of all the assault-and-battery cases that came up for trial in the maternal court. Here the boys wrestled out their quarrels, and from here the girls always came back sullen. It seemed as if we shut the great gate on subordination and good order every time we went into the mowing lot, probably because we were usually forbidden to go there, and laid aside the character of good children with the first step.

That new brick house, so sweet with its white pillars, stands on the very spot where our barn did. But come away; time would fail me to tell of our gambols there. Shall I take you into the house? Not through the wood-house, by the back door, though the tall white rosebushes, trained up to upper windows, make that entrance inviting enough. Not by the side toward the garden, through the glass door, into the little breakfast-room, though the offsets of smooth turf, and the lilacs that grew in the shade, made this pleasant enough. You must go quite around the house, and enter by one of the street doors. If you were totally familiar, you might go in at the south side, as I did, through the piazza. I would show you beside the door, the rosebush that bore both red and white flowers, which was always associated with thoughts of that parent of whom I recollected nothing so distinctly as the process of this grafting.

You might throw your bonnet and books upon the hall table, though the moment mother saw them, you would be called to put them in their places. How much a New-England mother, and an orderly bringing up, are worth, let those who have looked about on womankind, in some sections of our country, tell. But you ought to go in at the company door, up the gravel walk, stopping to gather lilacs, or snow-balls, seringa, and roses by the way, and lingering long enough on the door steps to breathe in the fragrance of the honeysuckle that wound its way nearly across the whole front, and looked in at every window.

But ah! it is of no use, if I could do it. They do not live here