Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/67



stated the Falls of Niagara to be six hundred feet high; and one can not help thinking a little curiously of what would have been the effects of the wonders of California upon such an imagination. How delicious, too, must have been the travels of that ambitious Yankee, Jonathan Carver, in 1766, who could indulge in a perfect abandon of inaccurate numerical values without the fear of a moral flagellation by an Argus-eyed press! At such a time all things might be measured sublimely by a comparative guess. For instance, I should say that yonder rock was as big as the village meeting-house, and that patch of corn just showing tiny forks of green above the brown soil was as large as Mr. Jonesfarm. In that forest across the river, beyond and through which the village of St. Anthony peers, hundreds of trees might bear the palm from the stately Northampton elms. So one might have traveled a hundred years ago—an artist fostering a love of the picturesque, and filling the galleries of the mind with a thousand pictures awakened by a natural sequence. One travels to-day a mathematical automaton, a slave to the moral rectitude of numbers, which happily in my own case usually vanish with the first profound sleep, leaving me the option of utter vacuity or some out-ofdate comparative measurement. Yet I acknowledge the necessity of public accuracy, and can only wonder if other travelers have in such a submission lost sight of individuality. While I was watching the infinite force and varied play of the rushing water, I did not fora moment lose consciousness that a waterfall must have an altitude expressed by at least three numerals to justify a thrill, although I have experienced the opposite sensation from being thousands of feet above the sea upon level land. In the one case the numbers limited the imagination, and in the other unduly excited it. I have reproved or incited my feel ings by something like the following considerations: This water-fall, which has awakened new ideas of sublimity and power, is not the proper subject for admiration, because others are higher. Or in a country whose monotony is only broken here and there by slight elevations, I have said to myself, "Think of being six thousand feet above the level of the sea!" In your cozy library you read the gigantic figures with a thrill; but often these numerical values have no visible meaning, and from the, top of a respectable hill in New England, not only an infinitely greater variety of country might be seen, but often of a greater extent. The opaline sky glowed pale and pure above and beneath the wire suspension - bridge, which hung across the river above the falls, connecting Minneapolis with a large island near the opposite shore. The bridge was a pretty work of art, uniting great strength with extreme delicacy of appearance. As I gazed a moment before at the surging waters, it seemed that power could only through them find a fitting expression. But here art was also triumphant, and the science of numbers looked proudly down from properly adjusted angles and curves.

The next day we took a carriage-ride to some of the celebrated places in the vicinity. The placarded lists, which were distributed through the hotel for the convenience of strangers, showed a large proportion of AZinnes (the Sioux term for water). This was used as a prefix, while the remainder of the word was descriptive, and suggested that the aboriginal mind had vexed itself in order to vary the characteristics. Even then there was a chain of lakes left to be honored by poetry, politics, and early settlers: Lake of the Isles, Lake Calhoun, and Lake Harriet; the last being named for Mrs. Snelling, the wife of the first Commandant of the old frontier fort. Whether or not Indian ingenuity succeeded in diversifying the characters