"Some months ago
I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the
Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination,
under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and
castles whose very names were magic to my ears, and each of which was the
subject of a legend. There were Ehren-breitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz,
which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There
seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed
music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of
enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an
atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after, I went
to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up
the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the
rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west
across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle now looked up the
Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff,-still
thinking more of the future than of the past or present,-I saw that this was a Rhine
stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the
famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic
age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and
obscurest of men".
