one of the fine, park-like woods, almost clear from
underbrush and carpeted with thick grasses and flowers, we met, (for it
was Sunday,) a little congregation just returning from their service,
which had been performed in a rude house in its midst. It had a sweet
and peaceful air, as if such words and thoughts were very dear to them.
The parents had with them all their little children; but we saw no old
people; that charm was wanting, which exists in such scenes in older
settlements, of seeing the silver bent in reverence beside the flaxen
head.

At Oregon, the beauty of the scene was of even a more sumptuous
character than at our former "stopping place." Here swelled the river in
its boldest course, interspersed by halcyon isles on which nature had
lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble
bluffs, three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely
definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned with those same
beautiful trees, and with buttresses of rich rock, crested with old
hemlocks, which wore a touching and antique grace amid the softer and
more luxuriant vegetation. Lofty natural mounds rose amidst the rest,
with the same lovely and sweeping outline, showing everywhere the
plastic power of water,--water, mother of beauty, which, by its sweet
and eager flow, had left such lineaments as human genius never dreamt
of.

Not far from the river was a high crag, called the Pine Rock, which
looks out, as our guide observed, like a helmet above the brow of the
country. It seems as if the water left here and there a vestige of forms
and materials that preceded its course, just to set off its new and
richer designs.

The aspect of this country was to me enchanting, beyond any I have ever
seen, from its fullness of expression, its bold and impassioned
sweetness. Here the flood of emotion has passed over and marked
everywhere its course by a smile. The fragments of rock touch it with a
wildness and liberality which give just the needed relief. I should
never be tired here, though I have elsewhere seen country of more secret
and alluring charms, better calculated to stimulate and suggest. Here
the eye and heart are filled.

How happy the Indians must have been here! It is not long since they
were driven away, and the ground, above and below, is full of their
traces.

"The earth is full of men."

You have only to turn up the sod to find arrowheads and Indian pot