Page:"Round the world." - Letters from Japan, China, India, and Egypt (IA roundworldletter00fogg 0).pdf/104

 in Scotland, but it was meagre compared with the gorgeous beauty of this inland sea. If we could put twenty Loch Lomonds together, and for every beautiful mountain on the margin, and every lovely island in the placid waters, plant a hundred mountains and a hundred islands, we should approximate the wealth and beauty seen in these heathen waters.”

Carleton, in his charming “New Way Round the World,” exhausts his vocabulary of glowing prose description, and can only express his admiration of what he calls “the indescribable glories of this inland sea,” by a beautiful poetic quotation, the last line of which is,

Now, I doubt whether I can conscientiously advise my friends to come eight thousand miles to witness anything, however grand, or picturesque, or beautiful in the way of natural scenery, but I may safely say that in going “round the world” I expect to find nowhere else such a combination of all the elements of beauty, such a feast of the senses and delights of the eyes, as here. Take the thousand isles of the St. Lawrence, the grand mountains of the Saguenay, multiplied without limit, and extending through two hundred and fifty miles of smooth end placid watera bright sun and a pure atmosphere, wooded hills and shaded ravines, a pretty village nestling in every narrow valley, fishing boats and satis almost innumerable, and you have the outline of a picture so beautiful as to be an excuse for any rhapsody of description. I know that we sometimes weary of other people's raptures in describing scenery, even when we ourselves are not insensible to such emotions when the scenes themselves are before us; and so I leave the unrivalled beauties of this inland sea to be fully realized and appreciated by such of my readers as may come after me in what will, in a few years, be a beaten track round the world.

At sunset we pass through its western gatewaya narrow strait, called Simonasaki, between the islands of Nippon and Kiusin, past a town of the same name containing about fifteen thousand inhabitants. The Daimio who owns this place thought proper, a few years ago, to levy toll upon the foreign as well as the immense native fleet that passed through this narrow gate, but was quickly brought to his senses by a descent of the war ships of the foreign