Of those beautiful descriptions of nature which lend so great a charm to Miss Bremer's fiction we find but few examples in her work on the United States. Unfortunately she travelled as a philosopher, not as an observer of nature; engaged in the study of social questions, she seems to have had neither the leisure nor the inclination to survey the magnificent scenery through which she passed. The area she traversed was very considerable; from New York she crossed the continent to New Orleans; she visited Canada, the lakes, the valley of the Mississippi, and made an excursion to Cuba; but of all the landscapes, sublime, beautiful, and picturesque that met her gaze, she says little or nothing. Even the mighty Niagara has scarcely power to move her; the rolling prairies make no impression on her imagination. From her book, therefore, we can offer no quotations. In a country like America social questions change their aspects with so much rapidity that Miss Bremer's opinions upon them are already antiquated. It is Nature only that preserves her character. The relations of the North to the South, of the slave-holder to the negro, or of the Democratic party to the Republican, may undergo, in twenty or thirty years a complete transformation; but Niagara still pours its flood of waters into the St. Lawrence, and leagues upon leagues of grassy savannahs are still untrodden by the foot of man. * * * * * The defect which we have indicated in Miss Bremer's "Homes of the New World" does not appear in the later work, "Two Years in Switzerland and Italy." Here we find that warm sympathy with Nature, that vivid appreciation of the beautiful, which we might reasonably expect from one who had the poet's feeling and fancy, though not endowed with the poet's faculty of expression.[12] In the opening chapter or "station," as she prefers to call it, we come upon a picture full of power and colour, in which the artist uses her pencil with equal grace and freedom. It is the valley of Lauterbrunnen, or "Laughing Waters":--