formed of the wonderful means by which Providence is clearing the
way for the advancement of civilization across the whole American
continent.



THE PATHFINDER.

CHAPTER I.

The turf shall be my fragrant shrine;
My temple, Lord! that arch of thine;
My censer's breath the mountain airs,
And silent thoughts my only prayers.
MOORE


The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to every eye. The
most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened
of the poet's thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into
the depths of the illimitable void. The expanse of the ocean is
seldom seen by the novice with indifference; and the mind, even in
the obscurity of night, finds a parallel to that grandeur, which
seems inseparable from images that the senses cannot compass.
With feelings akin to this admiration and awe -- the offspring of
sublimity -- were the different characters with which the action
of this tale must open, gazing on the scene before them. Four
persons in all, -- two of each sex, -- they had managed to ascend a
pile of trees, that had been uptorn by a tempest, to catch a view
of the objects that surrounded them. It is still the practice