At the period of my first visit, the huge piers of a new bridge, projected by the Columbian Railroad Company, were just appearing in different degrees above the gentle river's surface. The smoke of the workmen's fires rising from the wood above, and the numerous attendant barges moored beneath the tall cliff from which the road was to be thrown, added no little to the effect. I have since seen this viaduct completed, and have been whirled over it in the train of a locomotive; and, although it is a fine work, I cannot but think every lover of the picturesque will mourn the violation of the solitude so lately to be found here. I could not refrain from picturing to myself the light canoes of the Delaware Indians as at no very remote period they lay rocking beneath the shelter of that very bluff where now were moored a fleet of deep-laden barges: indeed these ideas were constantly forcing themselves, as it were, into my mind as I wandered over the changeful face of this singular land, where the fresh print of the moccasin is followed by the tread of the engineer and his attendants, and the light trail of the red man is effaced by the road of iron: hardly have the echoes ceased to repeat through the woods the Indian's hunter-cry before this is followed by the angry rush of the ponderous steam-engine, urged forward! still forward! by the restless pursuer of his fated race. Wander whither you will,--take any direction, the most frequented or the most secluded,--at every and at all points do these lines of railway intercept your path. Each state, north, south, and west, is eagerly thrusting forth these iron arms, to knit, as it were, in a straiter embrace her neighbours; and I have not a doubt but, in a very short time, a man may journey from the St. Lawrence to the gulf of Mexico coastwise with as much facility as he now does from Boston to Washington, a distance of four hundred and fifty miles, which may be at this day performed within forty hours, out of which you pass a night in New York.