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Show 180 Early Western Travels [ Vol. 26 XIV " Here I have ' scaped the city's stifling heat, Its horrid sounds and its polluted air; And, where the season's milder fervours beat, And gales, that sweep the forest borders, bear The song of bird and sound of running stream, Have come a while to wander and to dream." BRYANT. " I lingered, by some soft enchantment bound, And gazed, enraptured, on the lovely scene; From the dark summit of an Indian mound I saw the plain outspread in living green; Its hinge of cliffs was in the distance seen, And the dark line of forests sweeping round." Ftorr. THERE are few things more delightfully refreshing, amid the fierce fervour of midsummer, than to forsake the stifled, polluted atmosphere of the city for the cool breezes of its forest suburbs. A freshened elasticity seems gliding through the languid system, bracing up the prostrated fibres of the frame; the nerves thrill with renewed tensity, and the vital flood courses in fuller gush, and leaps onward with more bounding buoyancy in its fevered channels. Every one has experienced this; and it was under circumstances like these that I found myself one bright day, after a delay at St. Louis which began at length to be intolerably tedious, forsaking the sultry, sun- scorched streets of [ 155] the city, and crossing the turbid flood for a tour upon the prairies of Illinois. How delightful to a frame just freed from the feverish confinement of a sick- chamber, brief though it had been, was the fresh breeze which came careering over the water, rippling along the polished surface, and gayly riding the miniature waves of its own creation! The finest point from which to view the little " City of the French " is from beneath the enormous sycamores upon the opposite bank of the Mississippi. It is from this spot alone that anything approaching |