The heart must indeed be cold that would not glow among scenes like
these. Rightly did the French call this stream _La Belle Rivière_, (the
beautiful river.) The sprightly Canadian, plying his oar in cadence with
the wild notes of the boat-song, could not fail to find his heart
enlivened by the beautiful symmetry of the Ohio. Its current is always
graceful, and its shores every where romantic. Every thing here is on a
large scale. The eye of the traveller is continually regaled with
magnificent scenes. Here are no pigmy mounds dignified with the name of
mountains, no rivulets swelled into rivers. Nature has worked with a
rapid but masterly hand; every touch is bold, and the whole is grand as
well as beautiful; while room is left for art to embellish and fertilize
that which nature has created with a thousand capabilities. There is
much sameness in the character of the scenery; but that sameness is in
itself delightful, as it consists in the recurrence of noble traits,
which are too pleasing ever to be viewed with indifference; like the
regular features which we sometimes find in the face of a lovely woman,
their charm consists in their own intrinsic gracefulness, rather than in
the variety of their expressions. The Ohio has not the sprightly,
fanciful wildness of the Niagara, the St. Lawrence, or the Susquehanna,
whose impetuous torrents, rushing over beds of rocks, or dashing against
the jutting cliffs, arrest the ear by their murmurs, and delight the eye
with their eccentric wanderings. Neither is it like the Hudson, margined
at one spot by the meadow and the village, and overhung at another by
threatening precipices and stupendous mountains. It has a wild, solemn,
silent sweetness, peculiar to itself. The noble stream, clear, smooth,
and unruffled, swept onward with regular majestic force. Continually
changing its course, as it rolls from vale to vale, it always winds with
dignity, and avoiding those acute angles, which are observable in less
powerful streams, sweeps round in graceful bends, as if disdaining the
opposition to which nature forces it to submit. On each side rise the
romantic hills, piled on each other to a tremendous height; and between
them are deep, abrupt, silent glens, which at a distance seem
inaccessible to the human foot; while the whole is covered with timber
of a gigantic size, and a luxuriant foliage of the deepest hues.
Throughout this scene there is a pleasing solitariness, that speaks
peace to the mind, and invites the fancy to soar abroad, among the
tranquil haunts of meditation. Sometimes the splashing of the oar is
heard, and the boatman's song awakens the surrounding echoes; but the
most usual music is that of the native songsters, whose melody steals
pleasingly on the ear, with every modulation, at all hours, and in every
change of situation.--_Hon. Judge Hall's Letters from the West_.
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