storm and billow, and blackened by the deluging vans of the equinox. "Wherefore tax the past, For memories of sorrow? wherefore ask, Of the dark Future, what she grimly keeps Enough for us that the Present holds for us delicious compensation; that the moment is our own, exclusively for beauty; that the charm of the prospect before us is beyond question; at once prompting the desire to describe, yet baffling all powers of description. Yet why describe?-since, as Byron deplores "Every fool describes in these bright days." And yet, the scene is so peculiar, so individual, so utterly unlike that kind of scenery from which the traveller usually extorts his inspiration, that something need be said to make us understand the sources of beauty in a region which so completely lacks in saliency, in elevated outlines, in grand mountainous masses, rugged defiles, and headlong cataracts. Here are none of these. All that you behold - sea, and forest-waste, and shore-all lies level before you. As you see, the very waters do not heave themselves into giant forms, wear no angry crests, leap up with no threatening voices, howl forth nothing of their secret rages! We reject, at this moment, all the usual adjuncts which make ocean awful and sublime; those only excepted which harbor in its magnitude, its solemn sterility of waste, its deep mysterious murmurs, that speak to us ever of eternity, even when they speak in the lowest and most musical of their tones. In what, then, consists the beauty of the scene? Let us explain, and catalogue, at least, where we may not be able to describe. You are aware, dear readers, that you may set forth, on a periagua, or, if you like it better, a sloop, a schooner, or a trim little steamer; and, leaving the shores of Virginia, make your way along those of the Carolinas and Georgia, to Florida, almost entirely landlocked the whole voyage; all along these shores, the billows of the sea, meeting with the descending rivers, have thrown up barrier islands and islets, that fence in the main from its own invasions, Here are guardian terraces of green, eov ered with dense forests, that rise like marshalled legions along the very margins of the deep. Here are naked sand-dunes, closing avenues between, upon which you may easily fancy that the fairies gambol in the moonlight. Some are sprinkled with our southern palm-tree, the palmetto; others completely covered with this modest growth; others again with oak, and pine, and cypress; and there are still others, whose deep, dense, capacious forests harbor the red deer in abundance; and, skirting many of these islets, are others in process of formation; long stripes of marsh, whose perpetual green, contrasting, yet assimilating beautifully with the glare of sunlight on the sea, so relieves the eye with a sense of sweetness, beauty, freshness, and repose, that you never ask yourself the idle question, of what profit this marshits green that bears neither fruits nor flowers-its plumage that brings no grateful odor-its growth without market value? Enough, you say or feel, that, in the regions where you find it, it is a beauty and delight. And so, you navigate your bark through avenues of sea between these islets and the main; through winding channels where the seas lie subdued, their crests under curb, and resting in beds of green and solitude, only tenanted by simple herds of deer, or by wandering pilgrims of the crane, the curlew, the pelican and duck. Beyond, the great ocean plain stretches wide and far; and even when it rolls in storm, and its billows break in fury along the islet shores, not half a mile away-all here is safe! On either hand, the sheltering nook invites your prow; quiet harbors open for your reception, and offer security. Here, the creek that creeps like a shining serpent through banks of green; here, the bay that has been scooped out in a half circle, as if purposely to persuade you to harborage-are both present, affording refuge; the great oaks grow close down by the ocean's side, and hang over with such massive shadows, that you see the bath and the boudoir together. You have but to plunge in, and no Naiad takes offence; and, lifting yourself to the shores by the help of that great branch that stretches above the water, there you may resume your fig-leaves with impunity, assured that no prudish eyes have been shocked by your eccentric exhibitions of a nude, Apollo ! There is a wondrous charm in this exquisite blending of land and water scape. It appeals very sweetly to the sympathies, and does not the less excite the imagination because lacking in irregular forms and stupendous elevations. Nay, we are inclined to think that it touches more sweetly the simply human sensibilities. It does not overawe. It solicits, it soothes, beguiles; wins upon us the more we see; fascinates the more we entertain; and more fully compensates than the study of the bald, the wild, the abrupt and stern, which constitute so largely the elements in that scenery upon which we expend most of our superlatives. Glide through these mysterious avenues of islet, and marsh, and ocean, at early morning, or at evening, when the summer sun is about to subdue himself in the western waters; or at midnight, when the moon wins her slow way, with wan, sweet smile, hallowing the hour; and the charm is complete. It is then that the elements all seem to harmonize for beauty. The plain of ocean is spread out, far as the eye can range, circumscribed only by the blue walls of Heaven, and watched by starry eyes, its little billows breaking with loving murmur upon the islet shores — these, silvery light, as swept for fairy footsteps, or, glowing in green, as if roofed for loving hearts; trees, flowers, fragrance, smiling waters, and delicious breezes, that have hurried from the rugged shores of the Cuban, or the gradual slopes of Texas; or farther yet, from still more beautiful gardens of the South, where Death himself never comes but wrapped in fragrance and loveliness:—look where you will, or as you will, and they unite for your conquest; and you grow meek, yet hopeful; excited, yet satisfied; forgetful of common cares; lifted above ordinary emotions; and, if your heart be still a young one, easily persuaded to believe that the world is as full of bliss as of beauty, and that Love may readily find a covert, in thousands of sweet places of refuge, which God's blessing shall convert into happiest homes. Go through these sweet, silent, mysterious avenues of sea and islet, green plain, and sheltering thicket, under the prescribed conditions, at early morning or toward the sunset, or the midnight hour, and the holy sweetness of the scene will sink into your very soul, and soften it to love and blessing, even as the dews of heaven steal, in the night-time, to the bosom of the thirsting plant, and animate it to new develop ments of fruitfulness and beauty, And the scenery of the main partakes of the same character, with but the difference of foliage. It spreads upward into the interior, for near a hundred miles, a vast plain, with few inequalities of surface, but wondrously wooded. If, on the one hand, the islets, marshes, and savannahs, make an empire of sweetness and beauty; not less winning are the evergreen varieties that checker the face of the country on the other. Here are tracts of the noble live oak, of the gigantic pine, of the ghostly cypress; groves of each that occupy their several provinces, indicating as many varieties of soil. Amid these are the crowned laurel, stately as a forest monarch, the bay, the beech, the poplar, and the mulberry, not to speak of thousands besides, distinguished either from their use or beauty; and in the shade of these the dogwood flaunts in virgin white; and the lascivious jessamine wantons over their tops in sensuous twines, filling the air with fragrance; and the grape hangs aloft her purple clusters, which she trains over branches not her own, making the oak and the hickory sustain those fruits which they never bear! And so, in brief transition, you pass from mighty colonnades of open woods to dense thickets which the black bear may scarcely penetrate. At the time of which we propose to write, he is one of the denizens of these regions; here, too, the panther still lurks, watching the sheepfold or the deer! Here the beaver builds his formidable dams in the solitude of the swamp, and the wolf and the fox find their habitations safe. The streams are full of fish, the forests of prey, the whole region a wild empire in which the redman still winds his way, hardly conscious of his white superior, though he already begins to feel the cruel moral presence, in the instinctive apprehensions of his progress. And birds, in vast varieties, and reptiles of the ground, "startlingly beautiful," are tenants still of these virgin solitudes. The great sea-eagle, the falcon, the vulture; these brood in the mighty tree-tops, and soar as masters of the air; the wild goose and duck lead their young along the sedgy basins; the cormorant and the gull scream across the waters from the marshy islets; and are answered, with cooing murmurs, from myriads of doves that brood at noon in the deep covert of bristly pines. The mock-bird, with his various melodies, a feathered satirist, who can, however, forget his sarcasm in his passion; the red-bird and the nonpareil, with softer and simpler notes, which may be merry as well as tender, but are never scornful; the humming-bird, that rare sucker of sweets himself a flower of the air, - pioneer of the fairies—that finds out the best flowers ere they come, and rifles them in advance; and -- but enough. Very beautiful, dear friends, to the eye that can see, the susceptible heart, and the thoughtful, meditative mind, is the beautiful but peculiar province to which we now invite your footsteps. But, as we can not behold all this various world at once, let us persuade you to one fair locality, which you will find to contain, in little, all that we have shown you in sweeping generalities. You will suppose yourselves upon a well-wooded headland, crowned with live oaks, which looks out upon a quiet bay, at nearly equal distances between the waters of the Edisto and the Ashley, in the province of South Carolina. The islets spread between you and the sea, even as we have described them. There are winding ways through which you may stretch your sail, without impediment, into the great Atlantic. There are lovely isles upon which you may pitch your tents, and take your prey, while the great billows roll in at your very feet, and the great green tree shelters you, all the while, from the sharp arrows of the sun. You look directly down upon what, at the first glance, would seem a lake: the lands appear to enclose it on every hand; but there is a difference, you see, in the shade of yonder trees, from those on the islet just before us, which is due to the fact that an arm of the sea is thrust between; and here, on the other hand, there are similar differences which denote a similar cause. But our lake, or bay, is none the less sheltered or secure, because it maintains such close connection with the mighty deeps. Faintly afar, you may note, on the south and west, that there are still other islets, keeping up a linked line with that which spreads in front, and helping to form that unbroken chain, which, as I have told you, spreads along the coast from the capes of Virginia to those of the Floridian. The territory of the Floridian is under its old Spanish master still; an ugly neighbor of our amiable English, who tenant, in feeble colonies, these sylvan 'realms upon the verge of which we stand. The period, I may mention here, is the year of Grace (Grace be with us!) one thousand, six hundred and eighty-four. Our English colonies of Carolina are less |