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1 A little stream runs through the city, which, with intolerable affectation, they have styled the Tiber. It was originally called Goose-Creek.

2 "To be under the necessity of going through a deep wood for one or two miles, perhaps, in order to see a next-door neighbor, and in the same city, is a curious and I believe, a novel circumstance."-Weld, letter iv.

The Federal City (if it must be called a city) has not been much increased since Mr. Weld visited it. Most of the public buildings, which were then in some degree of forwardness, have been since utterly suspended. The hotel is already a ruin; a great part of its roof has fallen in, and the rooms are left to be occupied gratuitously by the miserable Scotch and Irish emigrants. The President's house, a very noble structure, is by no means suited to the philosophical humility of its present possessor, who inhabits but a corner of the mansion himself, and abandons the rest to a state of uncleanly desolation, which those who are not philosophers cannot look at without regret This grand edifice

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Oh say, was world so bright, but born to grace

Its own half-organized, half-minded race 3 Of weak barbarians, swarming o'er its breast,

Like vermin gendered on the lion's crest? Were none but brutes to call that soil their home,

Where none but demigods should dare to roam?

Or worse, thou wondrous world! oh! doubly worse,

Did heaven design thy lordly land to nurse The motley dregs of every distant clime, Each blast of anarchy and taint of crime Which Europe shakes from her perturbed sphere,

In full malignity to rankle here?

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is encircled by a very rude paling, through which a common rustic stile introduces the visitors of the first man in America. With respect to all that is within the house, I shall imitate the prudent forbearance of Herodotus, and say, тà dè èv ἀπορρήτῳ.

The private buildings exhibit the same characteristic display of arrogant speculation and premature ruin; and the few ranges of houses which were begun some years ago have remained so long waste and unfinished that they are now for the most part dilapidated.

3 The picture which Buffon and De Pauw have drawn of the American Indian, though very humiliating, is, as far as I can judge, much more correct than the flattering representations which Mr. Jefferson has given us. See the Notes on Virginia, where this gentleman endeavors to disprove in general the opinion maintained so strongly by some philosophers that nature (as Mr. Jefferson expresses it) be-littles her productions in the western world. M. de Pauw attributes the imperfection of animal life in America to the ravages of a very recent deluge, from whose effects upon its soil and atmosphere it has not yet sufficiently recovered. Recherches sur les Américains, part i. tom. i. p. 102.

4 On a small hill near the capitol there is to be an equestrian statue of General Washington.

Who lost the rebel's in the hero's name, And climbed o'er prostrate loyalty to fame;

Beneath whose sword Columbia's patriot train

Cast off their monarch that their mob might reign.

That nauseous slaver of these frantic times,

With which false liberty dilutes her crimes,

If thou hast got, within thy freeborn breast,

One pulse that beats more proudly than the rest,

How shall we rank thee upon glory's With honest scorn for that inglorious page?

Thou more than soldier and just less than sage!

Of peace too fond to act the conqueror's

part,

Too long in camps to learn a statesman's

art,

Nature designed thee for a hero's mould, But, ere she cast thee, let the stuff grow cold.

While loftier souls command, nay, make their fate,

Thy fate made thee and forced thee to be great.

Yet Fortune, who so oft, so blindly sheds Her brightest halo round the weakest heads,

Found thee undazzled, tranquil as before, Proud to be useful, scorning to be more; Less moved by glory's than by duty's claim,

Renown the meed, but self-applause the aim;

All that thou wert reflects less fame on thee,

Far less, than all thou didst forbear to be. Nor yet the patriot of one land alone, For, thine 's a name all nations claim

their own;

And every shore, where breathed the good and brave,

Echoed the plaudits thy own country gave.

Now look, my friend, where faint the moonlight falls

On yonder dome, and, in those princely halls,

If thou canst hate, as sure that soul must hate,

Which loves the virtuous, and reveres the great,

If thou canst loathe and execrate with me The poisonous drug of French philosophy,

soul,

Which creeps and winds beneath a mob's control,

Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabble's nod,

And makes, like Egypt, every beast its god,

There, in those walls - but, burning tongue, forbear!

Rank must be reverenced, even the rank that's there: So here I pause

we part:

- and now, dear Hume,

But oft again, in frank exchange of

heart,

Thus let us meet, and mingle converse

dear

By Thames at home, or by Potowmac here.

O'er lake and marsh, through fevers and through fogs,

Midst bears and yankees, democrats and frogs,

Thy foot shall follow me, thy heart and

eyes

With me shall wonder, and with me despise.1

1 In the ferment which the French revolution excited among the democrats of America, and the licentious sympathy with which they shared in the wildest excesses of jacobinism, we may find one source of that vulgarity of vice, that hostility to all the graces of life, which distinguishes the present demagogues of the United States, and has become indeed too generally the characteristic of their countrymen. But there is another cause of the corruption of private morals, which, encouraged as it is by the government, and identified with the interests of the commu

nity, seems to threaten the decay of all honest principle in America. I allude to those fraudulent violations of neutrality to which they are indebted for the most lucrative part of their commerce, and by which they have so long infringed and counteracted the maritime rights and advantages of this country. This unwarrantable trade is necessarily abetted by such a system of collusion, imposture, and perjury, as cannot fail to spread rapid contamination around it.

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And as I viewed the hurrying pace
With which he ran his turbid race,
Rushing, alike untired and wild,
Through shades that frowned and flowers
that smiled,

Flying by every green recess

That wooed him to its calm caress, Yet, sometimes turning with the wind, As if to leave one look behind,

Oft have I thought, and thinking sighed,
How like to thee, thou restless tide,
May be the lot, the life of him
Who roams along thy water's brim;
Through what alternate wastes of woe
And flowers of joy my path may go;
How many a sheltered, calm retreat
May woo the while my weary feet,
While still pursuing, still unblest,
I wander on, nor dare to rest;
But, urgent as the doom that calls
Thy water to its destined falls,
I feel the world's bewildering force
Hurry my heart's devoted course
From lapse to lapse, till life be done,
And the spent current cease to run.

One only prayer I dare to make, As onward thus my course I take; Oh, be my falls as bright as thine! May heaven's relenting rainbow shine Upon the mist that circles me, As soft as now it hangs o'er thee!

SONG

OF

THE EVIL SPIRIT OF THE WOODS.1

qua via difficilis, quaque est via nulla.
OVID. Metam. lib. iii. v. 227.

Now the vapor, hot and damp,
Shed by day's expiring lamp,
Through the misty ether spreads
Every ill the white man dreads;

fifty feet; but the Marquis de Chastellux makes it seventy-six.

The fine rainbow, which is continually forming and dissolving, as the spray rises into the light of the sun, is perhaps the most interesting beauty which these wonderful cataracts exhibit.

1 The idea of this poem occurred to me in passing through the very dreary wilderness between Batavia, a new settlement in the midst of the woods, and the little village of Buffalo upon Lake Erie. This is the most fatiguing part of the route, in travelling through the Genesee country to Niagara.

Fiery fever's thirsty thrill, Fitful ague's shivering chill!

Hark! I hear the traveller's song, As he winds the woods along; Christian, 't is the song of fear; Wolves are round thee, night is near, And the wild thou dar'st to roamThink, 't was once the Indian's home!?

Hither, sprites, who love to harm, Wheresoe'er you work your charm, By the creeks, or by the brakes, Where the pale witch feeds her snakes, And the cayman 3 loves to creep, Torpid, to his wintry sleep: Where the bird of carrion flits, And the shuddering murderer sits, Lone beneath a roof of blood; While upon his poisoned food, From the corpse of him he slew Drops the chill and gory dew.

Hither bend ye, turn ye hither, Eyes that blast and wings that wither Cross the wandering Christian's way, Lead him, ere the glimpse of day, Many a mile of maddening error Through the maze of night and terror, Till the morn behold him lying On the damp earth, pale and dying. Mock him, when his eager sight Seeks the cordial cottage-light; Gleam then, like the lightning-bug,

2"The Five Confederated Nations (of Indians) were settled along the banks of the Susquehannah and the adjacent country, until the year 1779, when General Sullivan, with an army of 4000 men, drove them from their country to Niagara, where, being obliged to live on salted provisions, to which they were unaccustomed, great numbers of them died. Two hundred of them, it is said, were buried in one grave, where they had encamped."- Morse's American Geography.

3 The alligator, who is supposed to lie in a torpid state all the winter, in the bank of some creek or pond, having previously swallowed a large number of pine-knots, which are his only sustenance during the time.

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Tempt him to the den that 's dug
For the foul and famished brood
Of the she-wolf, gaunt for blood;
Or, unto the dangerous pass
O'er the deep and dark morass,
Where the trembling Indian brings
Belts of porcelain, pipes, and rings,
Tributes, to be hung in air,
To the Fiend presiding there!1

Then, when night's long labor past, Wildered, faint, he falls at last, Sinking where the causeway's edge Moulders in the slimy sedge, There let every noxious thing Trail its filth and fix its sting; Let the bull-toad taint him over, Round him let musquitoes hover, In his ears and eyeballs tingling, With his blood their poison mingling, Till, beneath the solar fires, Rankling all, the wretch expires!

ΤΟ

THE HONORABLE W. R. SPENCER. FROM BUFFALO, UPON LAKE ERIE. nec venit ad duros musa vocata Getas. OVID. ex Ponto, lib. i. ep. 5. THOU oft hast told me of the happy hours

Enjoyed by thee in fair Italia's bowers, Where, lingering yet, the ghost of ancient wit

Midst modern monks profanely dares to flit,

And pagan spirits, by the Pope unlaid, Haunt every stream and sing through every shade.

There still the bard who (if his numbers be

His tongue's light echo) must have talked like thee,

1 "We find also collars of porcelain, tobacco, ears of maize, skins, etc., by the side of difficult and dangerous ways, on rocks, or by the side of the falls; and these are so many offerings made to the spirits which preside in these places." -See Charlevoix's Letter on the Traditions and the Religion of the Savages of Canada.

Father Hennepin too mentions this ceremony; he also says, "We took notice of one barbarian, who made a kind of sacrifice upon an oak at the Cascade of St. Antony of Padua, upon the river Mississippi." See Hennepin's Voyage into North America.

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How, 'neath the cowl, the festal garland shines,

And Love still finds a niche in Christian shrines.

There still, too, roam those other souls of song,

With whom thy spirit hath communed so long,

That, quick as light, their rarest gems of thought,

By Memory's magic to thy lip are brought. But here, alas! by Erie's stormy lake, As, far from such bright haunts my course I take,

No proud remembrance o'er the fancy plays,

No classic dream, no star of other days Hath left that visionary light behind, That lingering radiance of immortal mind, Which gilds and hallows even the rudest

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2 This epithet was suggested by Charlevoix's striking description of the confluence of the Missouri with the Mississippi. "I believe this is the finest confluence in the world. The two rivers are much of the same breadth, each about half a league; but the Missouri is by far the most rapid, and seems to enter the Mississippi like a conqueror, through which it carries its white waves to the opposite shore, without mixing them afterwards it gives its color to the Mississippi, which it never loses again, but carries quite down to the sea." Letter xxvii.

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