a trip of
three hundred, five hundred or a thousand miles that they have had the
mishap to make with him, (instead of using his stomach like a true born
Englishman, or his parti-coloured flag of abomination like a continental
personage,) they give the reader some idea of the scope of a River or of a
Lake in America. Or, when they note down that a parcel of knaves, with
sterling money of the realm of Great Britain, borrowed doubtless for the
purpose and, as they verily believe, never repaid to this hour, bought a
merchant ship; loaded her with every variety of live animals like an ark,
and then cruelly and nefariously precipitated her over the Falls of
Niagara, in order to gratify that national tendency for a great SPLASH,
which exists universally in every form throughout the whole of that
wretched experiment at self-government called the United States--they then
give the untravelled reader some conception of an American Fall of Water.
One may therefore with confidence write down in a grave Essay like this,
and expect it to be believed even by those who have not Morse's Geography
before their eyes, that there still is, and long has been, a fall of Water
by common courtesy distinguished as The Cataract of Niagara; and a river
in the State of Connecticut, called, without any of our 'usual'
cisatlantic inflation, Connecticut River.

I pass over all further preliminary matter, and proceed at once to state,
that the steamer which leaves New-York in the course of the afternoon,
enters, during the night, the long and tranquil expanse of water known by
the name of the Connecticut; and that when the passengers, after a quiet
night's rest, assemble upon decks that are moist with dew in the bright,
still, cheery morning of the early summer, they are gliding onward far up
that river, cutting its glassy bosom in the direction of the rays of the
rising Sun; the overpowering lustre of which is diminished by a soft and
precious Claude-like haze that hangs like a gauze of gossamer on the
borders of their way, a bridal veil just being lifted by the Sun;
tempering while it enriches the gilding of the shores, the waters, the
far-off spire, the contented farmer's house and barns, the unfrequent
trees, the cattle gazing at the approaching object, the sail you are
overtaking or meeting, and often, the fisherman, seen in the distance,
standing in his boat on the margin of the river, in his white
shirt-sleeves, waiting the passage of the steamer