Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/391

Rh This voyage up the Savannah river, which I had been warned against as slow and monotonous, was more agreeable than I can tell. The weather was charming, and as the stream was strong and the river swollen from the spring-floods, the voyage was slow; I had plenty of time to observe the banks between which the river wound, and though mile after mile and hour after hour presented me with only one scene, yet this scene was primeval forest. Masses of foliage from innumerable trees and shrubs, and beautiful climbing plants seemed resting upon the water on each side of the river, the shores of Georgia and Carolina. Lofty, deep, and impenetrable extended the primeval forest, as I was told, for many miles inland.

But here it existed in its original luxuriance and splendour. I seemed to myself to be present on the third day of creation, when God called forth the vegetable world, “every tree whose seed was in itself after its kind.” On the day when the earth opened its maternal breast and produced all the various trees and flowers of the earth, Savannah, with its red-brown water, was a river newly sprung from chaos, and rich with its essence, nor yet had had time to settle itself and clear its water, when the green plants of earth sprang forth in wild luxuriance; it seemed to play with them, and they, newly upsprung from the water, seemed to have no wish to part from it, but half longed to fall back into it. Flower-laden, climbing plants flung themselves to the very tops of the trees, and then fell down to dip again in the waves of the river. From amid these masses of verdure, forming porticoes, pyramids, and the most fantastic and massive creations, glanced forth now and then, a Calatpa all flaming with its yellowish-white flowers; dark-green, solemn magnolias lifted up their snow-white blossoms towards the light, beautiful and pure as it. I noticed sycamores, amber-bearing poplars, tulip-trees with their splendid yellow and red flecked blossoms, mulberries, many kinds of oak,