grim stoicism thou lookest down upon the busy miners, as with picks and powder-blast they rive the sullen mineral from thy vitals. Ay! watch thou by the lurid glare the sweating, half-naked forgemen, as they feed with thy forests the roaring furnaces. Watch the molten ore, slowly running in glittering streams, with fiery showers of scintillations into the dark earth-troughs below; while with ceaseless din, the ponderous trip-hammers, and clanking machinery, break the till now Sabbath stillness of thy dwelling place. But fare thee well, thou imperturbable old man; fare thee well, for now, we enter the dense continuous forest, through which the busy hand of man has with unwearied industry cut the avenue. How deliciously the aroma of the gigantic pines, mingles with the pure elastic air of the mountains. See the thick undergrowth; the dogwood with its snowy blossoms—the scarlet sumac—the waving green briar, profuse with delicate roses,—the crimson raspberry, loaded with its fruit—the yellow sensitive plant—the dancing blue-bell; and, rising through the entangled mass of verdure and beauty, see the luxuriant wild grape, and clinging ivy, joyously climbing the patriarchs of the forest, encircling their trunks, and hanging their branches in graceful festoons and umbrageous bowers.—No human foot, save with the aid of pioneer, can penetrate its matted wildness—nought save those huge patriarchs rising above it as they grow old and die, and fall with crashing uproar, as into flowery sepulchre, intrude upon its solitude. Then, indeed, in heavy booming plunge and rush, they seem to wildly sing, like their painted children, their death song. But hark!—whence that wild and dissonant shriek, that rings upon the ear? Ah—yonder, erect and motionless, he sits upon the towering oak with haughty eye and talons of iron, screaming his call of warning to his partner, slowly circling in graceful curves high, high in the blue ether above him. Ay! proud bird, our nation’s emblem, would that thy wild scream could warn from us, the accursed spirit of Mammon, which, spreading like an incubus, blights and destroys with its mildew the virtues and energies of her sons.