Syracuse, where the canal has not rise or fall enough to require a
lock for nearly seventy miles. There can hardly be a more dismal
tract of country. The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of
whitecedar, black-ash, and other trees that live in excessive
moisture, is now decayed and death-struck by the partial draining of
the swamp into the great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our
lights were reflected from pools of stagnant water which stretched
far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense masses of dark
foliage. But generally the tall stems and intermingled branches
were naked, and brought into strong relief amid the surrounding
gloom by the whiteness of their decay. Often we beheld the
prostrate form of some old sylvan giant which had fallen and crushed
down smaller trees under its immense ruin. In spots where
destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a hundred
trunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground, resting
on their shattered limbs or tossing them desperately into the
darkness, but all of one ashy white, all naked together, in desolate
confusion. Thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and
vanishing as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and
bounded by it, the scene was ghostlike,--the very land of
unsubstantial things, whither dreams might betake themselves when
they quit the slumberer's brain.

My fancy found another emblem. The wild nature of America had been
driven to this desert-place by the encroachments of civilized man.
And even here, where the savage queen was throned on the ruins of
her empire, did we penetrate, a vulgar and worldly throng, intruding
on her latest solitude. In other lands decay sits among fallen
palaces; but here her home is in the forests.