bery. Thomas Moore, who visited it in
1804, has well indicated its character in the following stanzas of
his legendary poem, called 'The Lake of the Dismal Swamp:'

"'Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds--
His path was rugged and sore;
Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds,
Through many a fen where the serpent feeds,
And man never trod before!

"'And when on earth he sank to sleep,
If slumber his eyelids knew,
He lay where the deadly vine doth weep
In venomous tears, and nightly steep
The flesh with blistering dew!'

"'They tell of a young man,' says Moore, in his introduction to his
poem, 'who lost his mind upon the death of a girl he loved, and
who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards
heard of. As he frequently said, in his ravings, that the girl was
not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp, it was supposed that he had
wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or
had been lost in some of the dreadful morasses.' The poet makes him
say:

"'They made her grave too cold and damp,
For a soul so warm and true,
And she has gone to the lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long by her fire-fly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.

"'And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
And her paddles I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I'll hide the maid in a cypress-tree,
When the footsteps of Death are near.'

"Towards the southern portion of the swamp there is a tract covered
with reeds, without any trees. These are continually green, and, as
they wave in the wind, have the appearance of water. On that
account it is called 'The Green Sea.' The eastern borders of the
swamp are covered with tall reeds, closely interlaced with thorny
bamboo-briers, and present almost an impassable barrier even to the
wild beasts that prowl there. Into this dismal region Washington
penetrated, on foot and on horseback, until he reached the lake in
its centre. He circumtraversed this lake, in a journey of almost
twenty miles, sometimes over a quaking bog, and at others in mud
and water; and just at sunset he reached the solid earth on the
margin of the swamp, where he passed the night. The next day he