All this, it has been our lot, once in our life to see;--when panic seized the strongest-minded, and fathers crowded their crying households into tottering skiffs that went rocking and doubtful over the swift eddies among bent forest trees--bearing within them the poor remnant of the husbandman's estate. And just such scenes, if report speak true, have startled the men and women of Western Pennsylvania, and have made this year of 1852 a sad epoch in their history. But we turn from this gladly to the bursting summer, which, with Minerva's suddenness, has leaped from the cleft skull of winter. In a week the flower-trees have put on bloom, and the grass caught its cloak of greenness. Why is it, that thus far we have no Virgil, or no prose pastoral to tell of the wondrous things which adorn the American spring and summer? If quick and gorgeous contrasts be any item in the sum of what makes up the beauty of a country, we have no rivals in the world; and we can show the gorgeous glassiness of ice, as wondrous in its adornments as are the silvan graces of our prairie wood. The time will come, by-and-by when the ocean-crossing shall be a matter counted by hours instead of days, when the searchers after the wonderful will gaze upon the ice-beauties of Niagara as they now feast on its summer. Schaffhausen, and Handel, and Terni, and the Clyde never wear those crystal robes and trimmings which deck, bridally, the bass-toned pipes of our great organ of Erie. The gush and the flow of sparkling water are all that lend grandeur or beauty to the great cataracts of Europe. And if summertime do not steep them in warm mists that catch the sunshine in "bounteous colors three," the autumn only hangs heavy and cold--spitting catarrhal spray, and no winter is keen enough to set the edge of the torrents in sharpened icicles, and to sheet the near-lying wood with silver. But Niagara--in such winter as has hung its lengthened pall upon our hoping hearts--dresses itself bridally; the rocks, loosened from the base, are sheathed in pearly casements, that rise with every morning's light, and comb over right and left, and climb in the very eye of the waters--breasting the spray, that clings ever, with new-added pearls, and cumulates into a mounded miracle of beauty. The near trees, too, catch the dampened air, day after day, and wear it in fleecy vestments, that bow them down, till their limbs touch the icy ground, and the visitor roams in fairy bowers of ice, and looks upon the spanning bow from the interstices of a crystal forest. Far away along shore the dripping boughs wear silvery coats, and glisten in the January sun, like trees of glass. The eddies below whirl crashing fragments, that come over the sounding precipice, like atoms playing in the sunbeams; the foam plays round the ice-cakes, like whipt cream around transparent jellies; and the blue of the unfathomed depths gleams to the light, like a sky, relieving the sparkle of a starry "milky way."