“You ask, in England, who has the privilege of this water?—or you say of an oak, that it stood in such a man's time; but with us water is an element unclaimed and unrented, _and a tree dabbles in the clouds as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul or responsibility._” “As you walk in the long porticoes of the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine-tops, _and the eagles sail across from horizon to horizon, without lifting their wings as if you saw them from the bottom of a well_.” “As far down towards Lake Ontario as the eye can reach, the immense volumes of water _rise like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing out in rings of foam, with an appearance of vexation and rage_ that I have seen in no other cataract of the world.” “He who has soiled his bright honor with the tools of ambition—he who has leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion—he who has loved, hoped, and trusted in the greater arena of life and manhood—must look back on days like these, _as the broken-winged eagle to the sky—as the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie_.” “_The chain of the Green Mountains, after a gallop of some hundred miles from Canada to Connecticut, suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long Island Sound, and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine trees, three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career by the sea._” “Next to their own loves ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring the loves of others; and while the violets and already-drooping wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or rejected by those slender fingers, _the sun might have swung back to the east like a pendulum_, and those seven and twenty Misses would have watched their lovely school-fellow the same.” An autumn forest—“_It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold, purple and crimson—had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light and color over the wilderness._” “_The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops, and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop's finger._” “Just above, there is a sudden turn in the glen, which sends the water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a cavern of unknown depth, into which _the whole mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a flying fiend into hell, and, re-appearing like the angel that has pursued him, glides swiftly, but with divine serenity, on his way._”