_Monday, 19th._--In the middle watch had a heavy squall, and carried away our foretop-gallant mast. At nine o'clock, A.M. made the American shore off Jersey, to the southward of Barney Gat. Wind light, no betting, but anxious speculations on the probability of our getting within Sandy Hook this day. Tuesday a hollow thing, feel "cock sure:"--about noon, wind died away; and, right enough, it was not until _Tuesday, August 20th_, that at three o'clock, A.M. I was called on deck to look upon the Hook lights, and count my wagers won. I received the omen as a good one, and so it proved. LAND, HO! I had often, and with much pleasure, heard intelligent Americans describe the restless anxiety with which they approached the shores of Britain; the almost painful degree of excitement created by the various associations crowding on the imagination, and jostling each other for supremacy, as they looked for the first time on their father-land. The veneration with which they pictured her ivy-clad towers, and the throb with which they caught the names of places long familiar to memory and hallowed by historical events, to all of which they felt their claim inherited from their ancestors, whether from Thames, or Tweed, or Shannon. To all of this I have, I say, listened with great pleasure, and with a full sympathy in feelings at once natural and generous, yet can I hardly admit them to possess more force, or their nature to be more exciting, or richer in the material whence Fancy frames her chequered web, than the recollections awakened in a well-stored imagination by a near approach to the shores of America. Although differing widely, these are to every philosophic mind, especially to a subject of Britain, at least equally stirring. When it is first remembered, that on all the long line of coast extending from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico there was not, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, one European family settled, or a Christian voice that woke the forest with the name of God,--not a civilized man from Canada to Florida, who placed his foot upon the soil to call it home. Yet now, within this immense range may be reckoned the mightiest States of the Union; and over its wide circumference are scattered great cities, towns aspiring to be cities, and villages fast growing into busy towns--possessing a population which for wealth hardly need yield to the oldest countries of Europe, and in the general diffusion of intelligence and education offering indeed to most of these an example worthy of their imitation.