Albany is the capital of the state of New York, the Empire State, as its inhabitants love to call it, and it is a name which it deserves, as fairly as our own old Yorkshire would deserve to be called the Empire County of England. It is rather an imposing town, rising straight above the Hudson river, gay with some gilded domes, and many white marble columns, only they are too frequently appended to houses of very staring red brick. From Albany to Utica, the railroad follows the stream of the Mohawk, which recalls the name of the early Indian dwellers in that bright valley, still retaining its swelling outline of wood-covered hills, but gay with prosperous villages and busy cultivation. I was perhaps still more struck the next evening, though it was a more level country, where the railway passes in the midst of the uncleared or clearing forest, and suddenly bursts out of a pine glade or cedar swamp into the heart of some town, probably four, three, or two years old, with tall white houses, well-lighted shops, billiard-rooms, &c.; and emerging, as we did, from the dark shadows into the full moonlight, the wooden spires, domes, and porticoes of the infant cities looked every bit as if they had been hewn out of the marble quarries of Carrara. I am aware that it is not the received opinion; but there is something both in the outward aspect of this region and the general state of society accompanying it, which to me seemed eminently poetical. What can be more striking or stirring, despite the occasional rudeness of the forms, than all this enterprise, energy, and life welling up in the desert? At the towns of Syracuse, of Auburn, and of Rochester, I experienced the sort of feeling which takes away one's breath; the process seemed actually going on before one's eyes, and one hardly knows whether to think it as grand as the Iliad, or as quaint as a harlequin farce. I will quote the words I wrote down at the time:

"The moment is not come for me yet, if it ever should come, to make me feel myself warranted in forming speculations upon far results, upon guarantees for future endurance and stability; all that I can now do is to look and to marvel at what is before my eyes. I do not think I am deficient in relish for antiquity and association: I know that I am English, not in a pig-headed adhesion to everything there, but in heart to its last throb. Yet I cannot be unmoved or callous to the soarings of Young America, in such legitimate and laudable directions too; and I feel that it is already not the least bright, and may be the most enduring, title of

my country to the homage of mankind, that she has produced such a people. May God employ them both for his own high glory!"

I am bound here in candour to state that I think what I first saw in America was, with little exception, the best of its kind; such was the society of Boston such was the energy of progress in the western portion of the State of New York.

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At Rochester, an odd coincidence occurred to me, striking enough I think to be mentioned, though it only concerned myself. After the arrival of the railway carriage, and the usual copious meal of tea and meat that ensues, I had been walking about the town, which dates only from 1812, and then contained 20,000 inhabitants, and as I was returning to the hotel, I saw the word Theatre written up. Wishing to see everything in a new country, I climbed up some steep stairs into what was little better than a garret, where I found a rude theatre, and ruder audience, consisting chiefly of boys, who took delight in pelting one another. There was something, however, at which I had a right to feel surprised. In a playhouse of strollers, at a town nearly five hundred miles in the interior of America, which, thirty years before, had no existence, thus coming in by the merest chance, I saw upon the drop-scene the most accurate representation of my own house, Naworth Castle, in Cumberland.

A great improvement has recently occurred in the nomenclature of this district; formerly a too classical surveyor of the State of New York had christened - I used the wrong term, had heathenised, to make a new one, all the young towns and villages by the singularly inapplicable titles of Utica, Ithaca, Palmyra, Rome: they are now reverting to the far more appropriate, and, I should say, more harmonious Indian names, indigenous to the soil, such as Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga.

I thought my arrival at Niagara very interesting. We had come to Lockport, where there is a chain of magnificent locks, on the Erie Canal, one of the great public works of America, and which has done much to enrich this Empire State of New York. The surplus of the receipts has enabled it to execute a variety of other public works. We arrived too late for the usual public conveyance. The proprietor of the stage-coach agreed to give me, with one or two other Englishmen, a lumber waggon to convey us to the falls. The Colonel, for he was one, as I found the drivers

of the coaches often were, drove his team of four horses himself. I generally found the stage-coach driving in the United States indescribably rough, but the drivers very adroit in their steerage, and always calling their horses by their names, and addressing them as reasonable beings, to which they seemed quite to respond. Altogether, the strangeness of the vehicle, the cloudless beauty of the night, the moonlight streaming through the forest glades, the meeting a party of the Tuscarora Indians, who still have a settlement here, the first hearing the noise of Niagara about seven miles off, and the growing excitement of the nearer approach, gave to the whole drive a most stirring and enjoyable character. When I arrived at the hotel, the Cataract House, I would not anticipate by any moonlight glimpses the full disclosures of the coming day, but reserved my first visit for the clear light and freshened feelings of the morning.

I staid five days at Niagara on that occasion; I visited it again twice, having travelled several thousands of miles in each interval. I have thus looked upon it in the late autumn, in the early spring, and in the full summer. Mrs. Butler, in her charming work on America, when she comes to Niagara, says only, "Who can describe that sight?" and, with these words, finishes her book. There is not merely the difficulty of finding adequate words, but there is a simplicity and absence, as I should say, of incidents in the scenery, or, at least, so entire a subordination of them to the main great spectacle, that attempts at description would seem inapplicable as well as impotent. Nevertheless, I have undertaken, however inadequately, the attempt to place before you the impressions which I actually derived from the most prominent objects that I saw in America. How, then, can I wholly omit Niagara? The first view neither in the least disappointed, or surprised, but it wholly satisfied me. I felt it to be complete, and that nothing could go beyond it: volume, majesty, might, are the first ideas which it conveys: on nearer and more familiar inspection, I appreciated other attributes and beauties - the emerald crest— the seas of spray · the rainbow wreaths. Pictures and panoramas had given me a correct apprehension of the form and outline; but they fail, for the same reason as language would, to impart an idea of the whole effect, which is not picturesque, though it is sublime; there is also the technical drawback in painting of

the continuous mass of white, and the line of the summit of the Fall is as smooth and even as a common mill-dam. Do not imagine, however, that the effect could be improved by being more picturesque; just as there are several trivial and unsightly buildings on the banks, but Niagara can be no more spoiled than it can be improved. You would, when on the spot, no more think of complaining that Niagara was not picturesque, than you would remark in the shock and clang of battle that a trumpet sounded out of tune. Living at Niagara was not like ordinary life; its not over loud but constant solemn roar has in itself a mysterious sound is not the highest voice to which the Universe can ever listen compared by inspiration to the sound of many waters? The whole of existence there has a dreamy but not a frivolous impress; you feel that you are not in the common world, but in its sublimest temple.

I naturally left such a place and such a life with keen regret, but I was already the last visitor of the year, and the hotels were about to close. I was told that I had already been too late for the best tints of autumn (or fall, as the Americans picturesquely term that season), and that they were at no time so vivid that year as was usual; I saw, however, great richness and variety of hue; I think the bright soft yellow of the sugar maple, and the dun red of the black oak, were the most remarkable. These and the beech, the white cedar, the hemlock spruce, the hickory, with occasionally the chesnut and walnut, seemed the prevailing trees in all this district. I can well imagine a person being disappointed in the American Forest; trees, such as those at Wentworth and Castle Howard (may I say?) seem the exception, and not the rule. The mass of them run entirely to height, and are too thick together, and there is a great deal too much dead fir; still there is a great charm and freshness in the American forest, derived partly perhaps from association, when you look through the thick tracery of its virgin glades.

On my going back I paid two visits at country houses; one to an old gentleman, Mr. Wadsworth, most distinguished in appearance, manner, and understanding, who had settled where I found him, fifty years before, when he had not a white neighbour within thirty miles, or a flour mill within fifty; he lived entirely surrounded by Indians, who have now disappeared. On some occasion, there had been a review of a corps of militia. A neigh

bouring Indian Chief had been present, and was observed to be very dejected; Mr. Wadsworth went up to him, and offered refreshment, which was usually very acceptable, but he declined it. Upon being pressed to say what was the matter, he answered with a deep sigh, pointing to the east, "You are the rising sun"— then to the west," We are the setting." The face of the country is now, indeed, changed; a small flourishing town, the capital of the county, stretches from the gate; and the house overlooks one of the richest and best cultivated tracts in America, the valley of the Gennessee. I fancy that quotations of the price of Gennessee wheat are familiar to the frequenters of our corn markets. My host was one of the comparatively few persons in the United States who have tenants under them holding farms; among them I found three Yorkshiremen from my own neighbourhood, one of whom showed me what he called the gainest way to the house, which I recognised as a genuine Yorkshire term; he told me that his landlord was the first nobleman in the country, which is also clearly not an Americanism. While on this topic I may mention that, on another occasion, I was taken to drink tea at a farmer's house in New England. We had been regaled most hospitably, when the farmer took the friend who had brought me aside, and asked what part of England Lord Morpeth came from? "From Yorkshire, I believe," said my friend. Well, I should not have thought that from his manner of talking," was the reply.

My other visit was to Mr. Van Buren, who had been the last President of the United States, and who, I suspect, shrewdly reckoned on being the next. It seemed, indeed, at that time to be the general expectation among his own, the Democratic, or, as they were then commonly called, the Loco-foco party. He was at that time living on his farm of Kinderhook; the house was modest and extremely well ordered, and nothing could exceed the courtesy or fullness of his conversation. He abounded in anecdotes of all the public men of his country. In his dining-room were pictures of Jefferson and General Jackson, the great objects of his political devotion. On my return through Albany, I had an interview with Mr. Seward, then for the second time Governor of the State of New York. I find that I noted at the time, that he was the first person I had met who did not speak slightingly of the Abolitionists; he thought they were gradually gaining ground. He had already acted a spirited part on points connected with slavery, especially