THE RIVER AND ITS HISTORY. 6
thirty years ago ; since then the river has added seven hundred acres
to it.
But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities
for the present—I will give a few more of them further along in the
book.
Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word
about its historical history—so to speak. We can glance briefly at
its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second
and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-
awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk
about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left
of the book.
The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use,
the word ' new' in connection with our country, that we early get
and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about
it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old
dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds
no just idea, no distinct realisation, of the stretch of time which they
represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw
the Mississippi Elver, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact
without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of
a sunset by astronomical measxirements, and cataloguing the colours
by their scientific names;—as a result, you get the bald fact of the
sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to
paint a picture of it.
The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us;
but when one groups a few neighbouring historical dates and facts
around it, he adds perspective and colour, and then realises that this
is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.
For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man,
less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat
at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, sans peur et
sans reproche; the driving out of the ~Knights-Hospitallers from
Rhodes by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Proposi-
tions,—the act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took
his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the
order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old ; Michael Angelo's paint