I cannot leave this interesting spot without an attempt to describe the beautiful scene.  A little to the right, the river widens into a sort of bay, with several fine islands covered with wood; in front, across the stream, as far as the eye can reach, are the forests of New Hampshire, with occasional headlands of greensward.  In the autumn, it has exactly the appearance of a gigantic flower-garden—­the trees being of every imaginable colour.  ‘Ah!’ said my friend, ’this is an interesting spot:  it was the favourite residence and hunting-ground of the Chippewas.  The Indians, like your monks of old in Europe, always chose the most beautiful and picturesque sites for their dwellings; but they have retired before the advance of a civilisation they could not share or appreciate.’  Talking in this way, as we returned, he called my attention to a singular phenomenon in the river.  At some remote period there was, and it remains to the present moment, a rock standing in the middle of the stream, about twelve feet in diameter at the top, of an irregular form, and of the hardest granite.  By the action of the water, a mass of granite had been thrown on the top, where it lodged.  At high-water, perhaps during three months in each year, the stream had caused this mass to revolve on its own axis, until it has worn itself of a round figure, and worn also the rock into a cup, now about six feet deep.  Still, it revolves when the water reaches it—­nature still plays at this cup-and-ball—­the ball weighing five tons.  Talk of this sort brought us to the railway.  In due time I reached home; and I do not remember to have ever been more interested than by the day spent at Lowell.

THE SEA AND THE POETS.

Of three poets, each the most original in his language, and each peculiarly susceptible of impressions from external nature—­Horace, Shakspeare, and Burns—­not one seems to have appreciated the beauty, the majestic sublimity, the placid loveliness, alternating with the terrific grandeur, of the ‘many-sounding sea.’  Judging from their incidental allusions to it, and the use they make of it in metaphor and imagery, it would seem to have presented itself to their imaginations only as a fierce, unruly, untamable, and unsightly monster, to be loathed and avoided—­a blot on the fair face of creation—­a necessary evil, perhaps; but still an evil, and most certainly suggestive of no ideas poetic in their character.

It is marvellous, for there is not one of these poets who does not discover a lively sense of the varied charms of universal nature, and has not painted them in glowing colours with the pencil of a master.  Who has not noted with what evident love, with what a nicely-discriminative knowledge Shakspeare has pictured our English flowers, our woodland glades, the forest scenery of Old England, before the desolating axe had prostrated the pride of English woods?  How vividly has not Burns translated into vigorous verse each feature of his native landscape, till