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Show 54 Earfy Western Travels [ Vol. 26 ment to the broad embouchure into the turbid floods of the Mississippi, it unites every combination of scenic loveliness which even the poet's sublimated fancy could demand. 9 Now it sweeps along beneath its lofty bluffs in the conscious grandeur of resistless might; and then its clear, transparent waters glide in undulating ripples over the shelly bottoms and among the pebbly heaps of the white- drifted sandbars, or in the calm magnificence of their eternal wandering, " To the gentle woods all night Sing they a sleepy tune." From either shore streams of singular beauty and euphonious names come pouring in their tribute [ 24] through the deep foliage of the fertile bottoms; while the swelling, vol-umed outlines of the banks, piled up with ponderous verdure rolling and heaving in the river- breeze like life, recur in such grandeur and softness, and such ever- varying combinations of beauty, as to destroy every approach to monotonous effect. From the source of the Ohio to its outlet its waters imbosom more than an hundred islands, some of such matchless loveliness that it is worthy of remark that such slight allusion has been made to them in the numerous pencillings of Ohio scenery. In the fresh, early summertime, when the deep green of vegetation is in its luxuriance, they surely constitute the most striking feature of the river. Most of them are densely wooded to the water's edge; and the wild vines and underbrush suspended lightly over the waters are mirrored in their bosom or swept by the current into attitudes most graceful and picturesque. In some of those stretched- out, endless reaches which are constantly recurring, they seem bursting up like beautiful bouquets of • Ohio is thought by some philologists to be a corruption of the Iroquois word, " Ohionhiio," meaning " beautiful river," which the French rendered as La Belle Riviere; see also Cuming's Tour, in our volume iv, p. 9a, note 49.- ED. |