Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/275

Rh of nature, which I had imagined would be so powerful, so divine, so terrible? Here, its waters were clear, of a fresh, light-green colour, and within their beautiful frame of distant violet-blue mountains, they lay like a heavenly mirror, bearing on their bosom verdant, vine-covered islands, like islands of the blessed. The Mississippi was here in its youth, in its state of innocence as yet. It has not as yet advanced very far from its fountains; no crowd of steamboats muddy its waters. Menomonie and one other, a still smaller boat, are the only ones which ascend the river above Galena; no cities cast into it their pollution; pure rivers only flow into its waters, and aborigines and primeval forests still surround it. Afterwards, far below and towards the world's sea, where the Mississippi comes into the life of the States, and become a statesman, he has his twelve hundred steamers, and I know not how many thousand sailing-boats, gives himself up to cities and the population of cities, and is married to Missouri: then it is quite different; then is it all over with the beauty and innocence of the Mississippi.

But now, now it was beautiful, and the whole of that evening on the Mississippi was to me like an enchantment.

The Mississippi, discovered by Europeans, has two epochs, and in each a romance: the one as different to the other as day and night, as the sunbright idyl to the gloomy tragedy, as the Mississippi here in its youth, and the Mississippi down at St. Louis, as Mississippi-Missouri. The first belongs to the northern district, the second to the southern; the former has its hero, the mild pastor, Father Marquette; the latter, the Spanish soldier, Ferdinand de Soto.

France and England, equally jealous competitors for territorial acquisitions, were the first possessors of the land of North America. The French Jesuits were the first who penetrated into the wildernesses of Canada and to the great lakes of the West. Religious enthusiasm