le of exciting emotions of wonder and
adoration more directly, than to travel alone through its forests.
Pines, lifting their hoary tops beyond man's vision, unless he inclines
his head so far backwards as to be painful to his organization, with
trunks which require fathoms of line to span them; oaks, of the most
gigantic form; the immense and graceful weeping elm; enormous poplars,
whose magnitude must be seen to be conceived; lindens, equally vast;
walnut trees of immense size; the beautiful birch, and the wild cherry,
large enough to make tables and furniture of.

Oh, the gloom and the glory of these forests, and the deep reflection
that, since they were first created by the Divine fiat, civilized man
has never desecrated them with his unsparing devastations; that a
peculiar race, born for these solitudes, once dwelt amidst their
shades, living as Nature's woodland children, until a more subtile being
than the serpent of Eden crept amongst them, and, with his glittering
novelties and dangerous beauty, caused their total annihilation! I see,
in spirit, the red hunter, lofty, fearless, and stern, stalking in his
painted nudity, and displaying a form which Apollo might have envied,
amidst the everlasting and silent woods; I see, in spirit, the bearded
stranger from the rising sun, with his deadly arms and his more deadly
fire-water, conversing with his savage fellow, and displaying the envied
wealth of gorgeous beads and of gaudy clothing.

The scene changes, the proud Indian is at the feet of his ensnarer;
disease has relaxed his iron sinews; drunkenness has debased his mind;
and the myriad crimes and vices of civilized Europe have combined to
sweep the aborigines of the soil from the face of the forest earth. The
forest groans beneath the axe; but, after a few years, the scene again
changes; fertile fields, orchards and gardens, delight the eye; the
city, and the town, and the village spires rise, and where two solitary
wigwams of the red hunter were once alone occasionally observed, twenty
thousand white Canadians now worship the same Great Author of the
existence of all mankind.

And to increase these fields, these orchards, these gardens, these
villages, these towns, and these cities, year after year, thirty
thousand of the children of Britain cross the broad Atlantic: and what
seeks this mass of human beings, braving the perils of the ocean and the
perils of the land? Competence and wealth! The former, by pruden