sight, dead in the body, in daily
act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to
which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with
the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller
from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter
weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a
noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently
useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow
along his way seeds of beauty not lost upon the thinking beings about
him, and bearing fruit perhaps in some future generation. The woman
whose reveries have pictured her a Joan of Arc, leading her country's
armies to victory, and finally yielding her life in the good cause, may
sew for sanitary commissions, and, nursing in some hospital, dropping
medicines, making soups and teas, die of some deadly fever, a willing
sacrifice to her country.

Later in the day we saw the corn and potatoes growing up to the very
verge of an exquisite waterfall, reckless strength and glorious poetry
side by side with patient utility and humble prose. This union seemed
not strange and unnatural, as did that of the solitary grave with the
active labor of supplying the living with daily food, the grave the more
lonely that the living with their material wants encircled it so
closely.

Keeseville is a manufacturing town, situated upon the Au Sable, which
here breaks through a layer of Potsdam sandstone, and presents a series
of most interesting and wonderful falls and chasms. About a mile below
the village is the first fall of eighty feet. The river has here a large
body of water, and falls in fan shape over a rapid descent of steps. It
takes a sharp turn, so that without crossing the stream, a fine view can
be obtained of the dancing, glittering sheet of foam. About half a mile
below is Birmingham, another manufacturing town, which has done its
best, but without entire success, to destroy the beauty of the second
fall, immediately below the bridge, said bridge being erected upon
natural piers at the sides and in the centre of the stream.

Here begins a chasm which continues for the distance of about a mile and
a half. Wonderfully grand are these Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,
through, which rushes the river, pent up between literally perpendicular
walls, a hundred or more feet in height, and from eleven to sixty or
e