For these reasons I must say that life on board these steamboats was not as pleasant as I had hoped to find it; but for our discomfort in this respect we found great atonement in the scenery through which we passed.  I protest that of all the river scenery that I know that of the Upper Mississippi is by far the finest and the most continued.  One thinks, of course, of the Rhine; but, according to my idea of beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the Upper Mississippi.  For miles upon miles—­for hundreds of miles—­the course of the river runs through low hills, which are there called bluffs.  These bluffs rise in every imaginable form, looking sometimes like large, straggling, unwieldy castles, and then throwing themselves into sloping lawns which stretch back away from the river till the eye is lost in their twists and turnings.  Landscape beauty, as I take it, consists mainly in four attributes—­ in water; in broken land; in scattered timber, timber scattered as opposed to continuous forest timber; and in the accident of color.  In all these particulars the banks of the Upper Mississippi can hardly be beaten.  There are no high mountains; but high mountains themselves are grand rather than beautiful.  There are no high mountains; but there is a succession of hills, which group themselves forever without monotony.  It is, perhaps, the ever-variegated forms of these bluffs which chiefly constitute the wonderful loveliness of this river.  The idea constantly occurs that some point on every hillside would form the most charming site ever yet chosen for a noble residence.  I have passed up and down rivers clothed to the edge with continuous forest.  This at first is grand enough, but the eye and feeling soon become weary.  Here the trees are scattered so that the eye passes through them, and ever and again a long lawn sweeps back into the country and up the steep side of a hill, making the traveler long to stay there and linger through the oaks, and climb the bluffs, and lay about on the bold but easy summits.  The boat, however, steams quickly up against the current, and the happy valleys are left behind one quickly after another.  The river is very various in its breadth, and is constantly divided by islands.  It is never so broad that the beauty of the banks is lost in the distance or injured by it.  It is rapid, but has not the beautifully bright color of some European rivers—­of the Rhine, for instance, and the Rhone.  But what is wanting in the color of the water is more than compensated by the wonderful hues and luster of the shores.  We visited the river in October, and I must presume that they who seek it solely for the sake of scenery should go there in that month.  It was not only that the foliage of the trees was bright with every imaginable color, but that the grass was bronzed and that the rocks were golden.  And this beauty did not last only for awhile, and then cease.  On the Rhine there are lovely spots and special morsels of scenery with which the traveler