R 10.

Silleri, August 24.

I have been a month arrived, my dear, without having seen your
brother, who is at Montreal, but I am told is expected to-day. I have
spent my time however very agreably. I know not what the winter may be,
but I am enchanted with the beauty of this country in summer; bold,
picturesque, romantic, nature reigns here in all her wanton
luxuriance, adorned by a thousand wild graces which mock the cultivated
beauties of Europe. The scenery about the town is infinitely lovely;
the prospect extensive, and diversified by a variety of hills, woods,
rivers, cascades, intermingled with smiling farms and cottages, and
bounded by distant mountains which seem to scale the very Heavens.

The days are much hotter here than in England, but the heat is more
supportable from the breezes which always spring up about noon; and the
evenings are charming beyond expression. We have much thunder and
lightening, but very few instances of their being fatal: the thunder is
more magnificent and aweful than in Europe, and the lightening brighter
and more beautiful; I have even seen it of a clear pale purple,
resembling the gay tints of the morning.

The verdure is equal to that of England, and in the evening acquires
an unspeakable beauty from the lucid splendor of the fire-flies
sparkling like a thousand little stars on the trees and on the grass.

There are two very noble falls of water near Quebec, la Chaudiere
and Montmorenci: the former is a prodigious sheet of water, rushing
over the wildest rocks, and forming a scene grotesque, irregular,
astonishing: the latter, less wild, less irregular, but more pleasing
and more majestic, falls from an immense height, down the side of a
romantic mountain, into the river St. Lawrence, opposite the most
smiling part of the island of Orleans, to the cultivated charms of
which it forms the most striking and agreeable contrast.

The river of the same name, which supplies the cascade of
Montmorenci, is the most lovely of all inanimate objects: but why do
I call it inanimate? It almost breathes; I no longer wonder at the
enthusiasm of Greece and Rome; 'twas from objects resembling this their
mythology took its rise; it seems the residence of a thousand deities.

Paint to yourself a stupendous rock burst as it were in sunder by
the hands of nature, to give passage to a small, but very deep and
beautiful river; and forming on each side a regular and magnificent
wall, crowned wit