Not far from the river was a high crag, called the Pine Rock, which looks out, as our guide observed, like a helmet above the brow of the country.  It seems as if the water left here and there a vestige of forms and materials that preceded its course, just to set off its new and richer designs.

The aspect of this country was to me enchanting, beyond any I have ever seen, from its fullness of expression, its bold and impassioned sweetness.  Here the flood of emotion has passed over and marked everywhere its course by a smile.  The fragments of rock touch it with a wildness and liberality which give just the needed relief.  I should never be tired here, though I have elsewhere seen country of more secret and alluring charms, better calculated to stimulate and suggest.  Here the eye and heart are filled.

How happy the Indians must have been here!  It is not long since they were driven away, and the ground, above and below, is full of their traces.

“The earth is full of men.”

You have only to turn up the sod to find arrowheads and Indian pottery.  On an island, belonging to our host, and nearly opposite his house, they loved to stay, and, no doubt, enjoyed its lavish beauty as much as the myriad wild pigeons that now haunt its flower-filled shades.  Here are still the marks of their tomahawks, the troughs in which they prepared their corn, their caches.

A little way down the river is the site of an ancient Indian village, with its regularly arranged mounds.  As usual, they had chosen with the finest taste.  It was one of those soft shadowy afternoons when we went there, when nature seems ready to weep, not from grief, but from an overfull heart.  Two prattling, lovely little girls, and an African boy, with glittering eye and ready grin, made our party gay; but all were still as we entered their little inlet and trod those flowery paths.  They may blacken Indian life as they will, talk of its dirt, its brutality, I will ever believe that the men who chose that dwelling-place were able to feel emotions of noble happiness as they returned to it, and so were the women that received them.  Neither were the children sad or dull, who lived so familiarly with the deer and the birds, and swam that clear wave in the shadow of the Seven Sisters.  The whole scene suggested to me a Greek splendor, a Greek sweetness, and I can believe that an Indian brave, accustomed to ramble in such paths, and be bathed by such sunbeams, might be mistaken for Apollo, as Apollo was for him by West.  Two of the boldest bluffs are called the Deer’s Walk, (not because deer do not walk there,) and the Eagle’s Nest.  The latter I visited one glorious morning; it was that, of the fourth of July, and certainly I think I had never felt so happy that I was born in America.  Wo to all country folks that never saw this spot, never swept an enraptured gaze over the prospect that stretched beneath.  I do believe Rome and Florence are suburbs compared to this capital of nature’s art.