far below the present mouth of the Ohio; the alluvial country now stretching from thence to the south, near a thousand miles, being then an arm of the sea. “No thinking mind,” says Flint, “can contemplate this mighty and resistless wave, sweeping its proud course from point to point, curving round its bends through the dark forests, without a feeling of sublimity. The hundred shores, laved by its waters; the long course of its tributaries, some of which are already the abodes of cultivation, and others pursuing an immense course without a solitary dwelling of civilized man on their banks; the numerous tribes of savages that now roam on its borders; the affecting and imperishable traces of generations that are gone, leaving no other memorial of their existence, or materials for their history than their tombs, that rise at frequent intervals along its banks; the dim, but glorious anticipations of the future--these are subjects of contemplation that cannot but associate themselves with a view of this river.” Though far inferior to these streams of the western world in point of length and volume, the Nile of the ancient continent may be placed at the head of remarkable rivers. One of its chief peculiarities is the solitary grandeur of its flow; for not a single affluent enters it from the junction of the Tacazze to the sea, a distance of 1500 miles--a circumstance without a parallel in the physical condition of rivers. Another of its striking features is its long course through a desert, dry, barren, and hideous, depositing by its annual inundation the richest soil on those portions of it which lie contiguous to its banks; and hence has originated the apt comparison of its career to the path of a good man amidst an evil generation. Egypt would be completely sterile were it not for the periodical overflow of its only stream, which both covers a large part of its surface with a layer of alluvion, and imparts to it the requisite moisture. “Rich king of floods! o’erflows the swelling Nile-- ----glad to quit The joyless desert, down the Nubian rocks From thund’ring steep to steep he pours his urn, And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave.”