Miss Bird's animated pages present so many delightful pictures of mountain scenery that we know not which to choose in illustration of her remarkable descriptive powers. We have already alluded to her faculty of pictorial presentment; it is one in which few of her sex surpass her; she puts a scene before us with as much life and distinctness as a Constable or a Peter Graham, and the reader, who would form a clear and well-defined conception of the Rocky Mountains in their picturesque aspects, cannot do better than study her little but delightful book. While reading it one seems to feel the pure, keen, mountain air around one; to see the great peaks rising one above the other like the towers and spires of some vast cathedral of nature; to watch the ever-shifting phantasmagoria of gorgeous colour that rolls over the landscape from sunrise to sunset, and in the hush of the moonlit night disappears before the silver radiance of the nascent orb; to hear the fall of the mountain streams, and to catch the breath of the fragrant wind that comes from the pine-forest loaded with fragrance and freshness and subtle odours. Traversing Colorado, in the neighbourhood of the Plate River, she tells us that she "rode up one great ascent, where hills were tumbled about confusedly; and suddenly, across the broad ravine, above the sunny grass and the deep-green pines, rose in glowing and shaded red against the glittering blue heaven, a magnificent and unearthly range of mountains, as shapely as could be seen, rising into colossal points, cleft by deep blue ravines, broken up into shark's teeth, with gigantic knobs and pinnacles rising from their inaccessible sides, very fair to look upon--a glowing, heavenly, unforgettable sight, and only four miles off. Mountains they looked not of this earth, but such as one sees in dreams alone, the blessed ranges of 'the land which is very far off.' They were more brilliant than those incredible colours in which painters array the fiery hills of Moab and the Desert, and one could not believe them for ever uninhabited, for on them rose, as in the East, the similitude of stately fortresses, not the grey castellated towers of feudal Europe, but gay, massive, Saracenic architecture, the outgrowth of the solid rock. They were vast ranges, apparently of enormous height, their colour indescribable, deepest and reddest near the pine-draped bases, then gradually softening into wonderful tenderness, till the highest summits rose all flushed, and with an illusion of transparency, so that one might believe that they were taking on the hue of sunset. Below these lay broken ravines of fantastic rocks, cleft and canyoned by the river, with a tender unearthly light over all, the apparent warmth of a glowing clime, while I on the north side was in the shadow among the pure unsullied snow. "'With us the damp, the chill, the gloom; With them the sunset's rosy bloom.'