floods of light are streaming far and wide along the magnificent forest-tops! When all is still--still! and sky, and earth, and wood, and stream are hushed as a spirit's breathing! When thought is almost audible, and memory is busy with the past! When the distant bluffs, bathed in molten silver, gleam like beacon-lights, and the far-off vistas of the {26} meandering waters are flashing with the sheen of their ripples! When you glide through the endless maze, and the bright islets shift, and vary, and pass away in succession like pictures of the kaleidoscope before your eye! When imagination is awake and flinging forth her airy fictions, bodies things unseen, and clothes reality in loveliness not of earth! When a scene like this is developed, what shall adequately depict it? Not the pen. Such, such is the beautiful Ohio in the soft days of early summer; and though hackneyed may be the theme of its loveliness, yet, as the dying glories of a Western sunset flung over the landscape the mellow tenderness of its parting smile, "fading, still fading, as the day was declining," till night's dusky mantle had wrapped the "woods on shore" and the quiet stream from the eye, I could not, even at the hazard of triteness, resist an inclination to fling upon the sheet a few hurried lineaments of Nature's beautiful creations. There is not a stream upon the continent which, for the same distance, rolls onward so calmly, and smoothly, and peacefully as the Ohio. Danger rarely visits its tranquil bosom, except from the storms of heaven or the reckless folly of man, and hardly a river in the world can vie with it in safety, utility, or beauty. Though subject to rapid and great elevations and depressions, its current is generally uniform, never furious. The forest-trees which skirt its banks are the largest in North America, while the variety is endless; several sycamores were pointed out to us upon the shores from thirty to fifty feet in circumference. Its alluvial {27} bottoms are broad, deep, and exhaustlessly fertile; its bluffs are often from three to four hundred feet in height; its breadth varies from one mile to three, and its navigation, since the improvements commenced, under the authority of Congress, by the enterprising Shreve, has become safe and easy.[10] The classification of obstructions is the following: _snags_, trees anchored by their roots; fragments of trees of various forms and magnitude; _wreck-heaps_, consisting of several of these stumps, and logs, and branches of trees lodged in one place; _rocks_, which have rolled from the cliffs, and varying from ten to one hundred cubic feet in size; and _sunken boats_, principally flat-boats laden with coal. The last remains one of the most serious obstacles to the navigation of the Ohio. Many steamers have been damaged by striking the wrecks of the _Baltimore_, the _Roanoke_, the _William Hulburt_,[11] and other craft, which were themselves snagged; while keel and flat-boats