hould ever see them again.

Though emerging from the walls of a classic college, I was far from
being tinctured with classic sympathies. Ten years spent in pondering
over the wild hyperbole of Homer, the mechanical verse-work of Virgil,
and the dry indelicacies of Horatius Flaccus, had failed to imbue me
with a perception of that classic beauty felt, or pretended to be felt,
by the spectacled _savant_. My mind was not formed to live on the
ideal, or dream over the past. I delight rather in the real, the
positive, and the present. Don Quixotes may play the troubadour among
ruined castles, and mincing misses cover the ground of the guide-books.
For my part I have no belief in the romance of old-world life. In the
modern Tell I behold a hireling, ready to barter his brawny limbs to the
use of whatever tyrant; and the picturesque Mazzaroni, upon closer
acquaintance, dwindles down to the standard of a hen-roost thief. Amid
the crumbling walls of Athens and the ruins of Rome I encounter
inhospitality and hunger. I am not a believer in the picturesqueness of
poverty. I have no relish for the romance of rags.

And yet it was a yearning for the romantic that called me from home. I
longed for the poetic and picturesque, for I was just at that age when
the mind is imbued with its strongest faith in their reality. Ha! mine
is not yet disabused of this belief. I am older now, but the hour of
disenchantment has not yet come upon me--nor ever will. There is a
romance in life, that is no illusion. It lives not in the effete forms
and childish ceremonies of the fashionable drawing-room--it has no
illustration in the tinsel trappings and gaudy puerilities of a Court.
Stars, garters, and titles are its antidotes; red cloth and plush the
upas-trees of its existence.

Its home is elsewhere, amid the grand and sublime scenes of Nature--
though these are not necessary accompaniments. It is no more incidental
to field and forest, rock, river, and mountain, than to the well-trodden
ways of the trading-town. Its home is in human hearts--hearts that
throb with high aspirations--bosoms that burn with the noble passions of
Liberty and Love!

My steps then were not directed towards classic shores, but to lands of
newer and more vigorous life. Westward went I in search of romance. I
found it in its most attractive form under the glowing skies of
Louisiana.

In the month of January, 18--, I set foot upon the soil of the
New-Worl