SOME IMPORTED ARTICLES. 257
Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis),
seven years later—
' It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred
miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature, that you
begin to understand all Ms might and majesty. You see him fertilising a
boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand
victories over the shattered forest—here carrying away large masses of soil
with all their growth, and there forming islands, destined at some future
period to be the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect, it is
then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed
through two or three thousand miles, and has yet to travel one thousand
three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination.7
Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, B. 2T. author of
the sea tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray—
* Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a
century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from
the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The stream
itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed.
It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing fertility in its
course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can
you wander upon its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream.
It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few
of those who are receive^ into its waters ever rise again,1 or can support
themselves long upon its surface without assistance from some friendly log,
It contains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and
fiuch genus, and as you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid
alligator, while the panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost im-
pervious to man. Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered
with trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests
in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the
stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots, often
blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river, which, as if in
anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole country round;
and as soon as it forces its way through its former channel, plants in every
direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest (upon whose branches the bird
will never again perch, or the raccoon, the opossum, or the squirrel climb)
1 There was a foolish superstition of some little prevalence in that day,
that the Mississippi would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned
person's body to rise to the surface.
8