Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/716

706 farther south, toward Mount Hood in that direction, and Mount Adams on the north. If the Palisades were quintupled in height, domed instead of level on their upper surfaces, extended up the whole navigable course of the Hudson, and were thickly clad with evergreens wherever they were not absolutely precipitous, the Hudson would much more closely resemble the Columbia.

I was reminded of another Eastern river, which I had never heard mentioned, in the same company. As we ascended toward the cataract, the Columbia water assumed a green tint as deep and positive as that of the Niagara between the Falls and Lake Ontario. Save that its surface was not so perturbed with eddies and marbled with foam, it resembled the Niagara perfectly.

We boarded the Hunt in a dense fog, and went immediately to breakfast. With our last cup of coffee the fog cleared away and showed us a sunny vista up the river, bordered by the columnar and mural trap formations above mentioned, with an occasional bold promontory jutting out beyond the general face of the precipice, its shaggy fell of pines and firs all aflood with sunshine to the very crown. The finest of these promontories was called Cape Horn, the river bending around it to the northeast. The channel kept mid-stream with considerable uniformity,—but now and then, as in the highland region of the Hudson, made a détour to avoid some bare, rocky island. Several of these islands were quite columnar,—being evidently the emerged capitals of basaltic prisms, like the other uplifts on the banks. A fine instance of this formation was the stately and perpendicular "Rooster Rock" on the Oregon side, but not far from Cape Horn. Still another was called "Lone Rock," and rose from the middle of the river. These came upon our view within the first hour after breakfast, in company with a slender, but graceful stream, which fell into the river over a sheer wall of basalt seven hundred feet in height. This little cascade reminded us of Po-ho-nó, or The Bridal Veil, near the lower entrance of the Great Yo-Semite.

As the steamer rounded a point into each new stretch of silent, green, and sunny river, we sent a flock of geese or ducks hurrying cloudward or shoreward. Here, too, for the first time in a state of absolute Nature, I saw that royal bird, the swan, escorting his mate and cygnets on an airing or a luncheon-tour. It was a beautiful sight, though I must confess that his Majesty and all the royal family are improved by civilization. One of the great benefits of civilization is, that it restricts its subjects to doing what they can do best. Park-swans seldom fly,—and flying is something that swans should never attempt, unless they wish to be taken for geese. I felt actually désillusionné, when a princely cortége, which had been rippling their snowy necks in the sunshine, clumsily lifted themselves out of the water and slanted into the clouds, stretching those necks straight as a gun-barrel. Every line of grace seemed wire-drawn out of them in a moment. Song is as little their forte as flight,—barring the poetic license open to moribund members of their family,—and I must confess, that, if this privilege indicate approaching dissolution, the most intimate friends of the specimens we heard have no cause for apprehension. An Adirondack loon fortifying his utterance by a cracked fish-horn is the nearest approach to a healthy swan-song. On the whole, the wild swan cannot afford to "pause in his cloud" for all the encomiums of Mr. Tennyson, and had better come down immediately to the dreamy water-level where he floats dream within dream, like a stable vapor in a tangible sky. Anywhere else he seems a court-beauty wandering into metaphysics.

Alternating with these swimmers came occasional flocks of shag, a bird belonging to the cormorant tribe, and here and there a gull, though these last grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. I was surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the channel, twenty miles