One thing struck me as remarkable at the West, and particularly at St. Louis. I refer to the appearance of the heavens at sunset. Nothing can exceed the richness and splendour of a western sunset. I have heard much of an Italian sky, but my imagination never conceived such pictures of beauty and indescribable glory, as are painted on the sky here at the decline of day. The whole hemisphere seems flooded with unearthly radience. The clouds piled up the western sky, appear more brilliant and gorgeous than any or all the colours of earth can make them. And as you look at them, you see, through the clouds, apertures, which seem like golden vistas, through which you look almost into the heaven of heavens. Our Fourth of July has been spent quietly here. There has not been half the noise and disturbance I had anticipated. _Wednesday Evening, July 5th._ We this morning left St. Louis about nine o'clock. Our progress up the river has been slow. Some eighteen miles from St. Louis we witnessed one of the most interesting sights in all our journey--_the meeting of the waters of the Mississippi and the Missouri_! I cannot attempt description! The imagination alone can conceive it. If I ever had feelings of sublimity waked up in my bosom, it was when our boat stood off just abreast the Missouri, and I looked up its mighty channel, and thought of its source between two and three thousand miles distant, amid those mountains whose tops are covered with eternal snow, and then thought of the sunny orange groves, near where it empties its waters into the ocean! We stopped a few hours at Alton, Illinois, just above the point where the Missouri mingles its waters with the Mississippi. This is an interesting town, fast rising into importance. It is destined to become a point of great interest. Its present population exceeds two thousand. We passed Marion City and Quincy, as we advanced up the river. Of the former we have heard frequent descriptions. We stopped an hour or so at the latter, and enjoyed from the high bluff on which it is built, a view of one of the most magnificent prospects that ever stretched before the human eye. The expanded waters of the Mississippi--the innumerable green islets that seem to float on its bosom--the beautiful vistas opening between these--the boundless ocean of forest stretching off to the south and west, and the level, treeless, luxuriant prairie running back to an unknown distance--all these lay at your feet, furnishing one of the most picturesque scenes upon which the eye ever gazed. I regretted the shortness of our stay at Quincy, not only on account of the enchanting loveliness of the spot, but more particularly as it deprived me of the pleasure of paying a visit to Dr. Nelson, the author of a popular work entitled, "_The cause and cure of Infidelity_," a book of sterling excellence.