Indeed, if beauty of scenery is the attracting cause, we know of no more glowing outline of shore and mountain than hems the summer traveler, over the Alleghenies and along the rich wooded banks of the Ohio. Western Pennsylvania, with its Juniata, and its heavy-forested mountains, has no rival in the world of silvan beauty. The heights are sharp, and bold; the torrents are foamy, and wreathed into combing waterfalls, that drip, to the eye, through bowers of green. You see below you tops of woods, and forests that seem bandlets of shrubbery, and great rivers that are ribbons of silver. You see around you climbing heights, in all the sullenness of undisturbed nature--rich with every tree that grows, and echoing the shrill sounds of wild birds, and catching, with four-fold echoes, the sharp whistle of your groaning and puffing engine. You run along the edge of cliffs, with a nearness and a speed that would shock you to fear, did not the amazing grandeur sublime all sense of danger, and hand over your admiring sense into the guardianship of that Providence which rears the mountains, and plumbs the depths. And when the mountains are past, there is no low-lying fat Bedford level, to fatigue the eye; but the country is rounded into sweeping, irregular hillocks of green, whose sides are hoary with old wood, or verdant with the richest of springing grain crops. And in the bosoms of such hills, where the flow of water finds outlet, bright brooks silver the rounded mountains, and cover the earth into fragmentary lapses of meadow that tax the mower with the luxuriance of their grasses. If the reader has ever loitered among the green hill-slopes of Northern Devonshire, he may form therefrom a just, though a miniature idea of those green billows of land, which drop the Allegheny heights to the borders of the Ohio. And as for that far-western stream, which the French called, with a fitness of calling which we rarely cherish, _la belle rivière_--its banks are all a wonder, and its islands floating wonders. The time is not far away when the loiterers of the civilized world who have not drank in the beauties that hedge the Ohio banks, and mirror themselves in the placid Ohio water, will be behind their profession. The Rhine and the Hudson have each their beauties; and so has Lake George, with its black mountain lying gaunt upon the water: but the Ohio, with its bordering hills, fat and fertile to their very summits--various in outline as are summer shadows--and with its rich drooping foliage, touching the water, and its islands seeming to float in the stillness--and its bordering towns of modest houses sprinkling the banks and dotting the alluvial edge, and all mirrored, as clearly as your face in your morning glass, upon the bright steel surface that shines through a thousand miles of country--is worthy of as honorable mention as any river that flows.