w-born hope, as they float down to sea,
And, moving counter to their winged friends,
Cross to Lopatka, where they only wait
Replenishment, which nature always sends,
Where faith is instinct as in lower life,
(The birds teach providence, without a chance,)
And so they wander on, to the Aleutes;
Passing and calling, as they still advance,
They reach to where Alaska strikes the sea,
In severance to meet them. They kept on,
Feeding on eggs of seabirds, and the meats
That everywhere supplied them. They have gone
So far on Nature's very track, and now
A narrow river beckons their research,
And they pass upward, till a mountain range
Confronts their passage, like a royal perch
From which the gods might frown their hardihood,
For this intrusion of another world.
But they have battled with the plague and flood;
And though Olympus all his thunders hurled,
They had not turned; they saw the earnest need
Of pushing forward ere the sun turned back,
And so they crossed to where the eastern slope,
Feeds the McKenzie. Here an easy track
Leads down and cuts the stronger range in two,
A little while among its shadows grope,
When the broad prospect opened to their view.
They follow the receding sun in hope,
Still bearing to the east their steady trend,
Hoping to win their God to close embrace;
And morn and eve around their altars bend
In thankfulness, that they still see his face.
Through many valleys, virgin to their sight,
And many lakes, whose bosoms never stirred
To man, the weak pretender of God's might;
But nature spreads her happy hearth with beast and flower
and bird.

PART SECOND.

AZTLAN.

THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

Father of Waters! Nilus of the West!
Thou holdst thy secrets from the sons of men;
A knowledge of the past which none would wrest
Or wish to circumscribe with tongue or pen
To the weak bonds of history; but rather stand
With old De Soto on thy banks, and reverence the hand
That drew the fetters from thy limbs, and set thee first at birth,
On thy unmuzzled pilgrimage, without a peer on