From Everglades to Dismal Swamp Rose on the hot and trembling air Cloud after cloud, in dark array, Enfolding from their serpent lair The starry flag that guards the free:-- One after one its stars grew dun, Heaven given to shine on Liberty. But swifter than the lightning's gleam Flashed out the spears of Northern-light, And with the north wind's saving wings, The cloud-host, vanquished, took to flight. Then in her white-winged radiance there The angel Freedom conquering came, Relit once more her brilliant stars, To burn with an eternal flame. * * * * * ON THE PLAINS. The plains is the current designation of the region stretching westward from Missouri--or rather from the western settlements of Kansas and Nebraska--to the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. Part of it is included under the vague designation of 'the Great American Desert;' but that title is applicable to a far larger area westward than eastward of the Rocky Mountains. The Great Basin, whereof Salt Lake is the lowest point, and the Valley of the Colorado, which skirts it on the east, are mainly sterile from drouth or other causes--not one acre in each hundred of their surface being arable without irrigation, and not one in ten capable of being made productive by irrigation. Arid, naked, or thinly shrub-covered mountains traverse and chequer those deep yet elevated valleys, wherein few savages or even wild animals of any size or value were ever able to find subsistence. Probably that of the Colorado is, as a whole, the most sterile and forbidding of any valley of equal size on earth, unless it be that of one of the usually frozen rivers in or near the Arctic circle. Even Mormon energy, industry, frugality and subservience to sacerdotal despotism, barely suffice to wrench a rude, coarse living from those narrow belts and patches of less niggard soil which skirt those infrequent lakes and scanty streams of the Great Basin which are susceptible of irrigation; mines alone (and they must be rich ones) can ever render populous the extensive country which is interposed between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.