's day. There was not
a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among
which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness
till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to
one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth.
These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the
platform by the hour; and, as I saw, one after another, pleasant
villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard
cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun no
longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among
shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand
accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this
rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had
asked the name of the river from the brakesman, and heard that it was
called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and
parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named
the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the
fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river
and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special
pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where
nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the
United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought
their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with
Bellefontaine, and with Sansdusky. Chelsea, with its London associations
of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is own suburb to
stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated
names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and
Arkansas[1]; and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched
by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red
Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below
anglified New York. The names of the States and Territories themselves
form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio,
Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas;
there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful
land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his
verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the name