nd newsboys. I
have given warning that if any of the latter come within my grounds with
his French things, I will souse him in the river, and hold him there till
he shall be thoroughly chilled into a dislike of these parts. You will
readily imagine why we are here. The excitements and distractions of city
life for the last few months were too much for us, and there are some
things that can only be enjoyed apart from the world. Here, we subside
gradually and gracefully from that high and tense delirium from which I at
least made my aerials, always coming back, however, to young JULIAN; who,
by the way, is another occasion for country life, as I have great faith in
first impressions, and I wish his to be bright and beautiful. Heaven
preserve him from all darker colors; from the doubts, the glooms, the
moral mistiness of your city atmosphere! Let no fog come between him and
the bright sky, till he has well discovered that there is a heaven beyond,
where there is neither cloud nor shadow, and up to which not one grain of
all this dust and filth of the earth's whirling shall ever reach. It is
quite enough that we are in sight and hearing of your great Babels; the
jarring of their daily strife and the smoke of their torments. A lively
and dashing river rolls between us, going off at a hand-gallop among rocky
islands, over which we see their spires pointing up like electric-rods to
avert the wrath that might otherwise descend upon them; and mingling with
the dash of waters, we hear now and then their petty alarms, their
steamers and fire-bells, and the dozen other occasions upon which they see
fit to make a great noise in the world; but the travelled sound has a
courtliness that is rather pleasant than otherwise; and as a key-note to
our mocking-birds, it is quite worthy of the sweet south that brings it
up. Whenever there is any sudden ebullition that cannot be pared down to
the common air, we are made aware of it by a cannonading that is doubtless
very considerable down there, but for any thing so ambitiously meant, it
sounds here very miserable; a wretched attempt at notoriety, of which the
most noticeable is the smoke of their powder. And so with all their
sky-flourishing and rocketing, which we look at as at a falling star;
pretty, no doubt, but not in our way. Every morning a railroad train
starts out, and approaching within a mile, disappears among the hills with
a slight buzzing and squibbing, like the fly on the window;