The Prose Works of N.P. Willis (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855 Excerpt: ... and leafy midst of June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon its bosom for days; the ragged trees upon its green shore dropping their branches into the stirless water, as if it were some rigid imitation--the lake glass, and the leaves emerald; the sky was of an April blue, as if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness, till you could see through its clarified depths to the gates of heaven; and yet breathless and sunny as was the face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass--searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of existence. No one can conceive, who has not had his imagination stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic solitudes of the west, the vastness of the unbroken phases of nature; where every tree looks a king, and every flower a marvel of glorious form and color--where the rocks are rent every one as by the " tenth" thunderbolt--and lake, mountain, or river, ravine or waterfall, cave or eagle's nest, whatever it maybe that feeds the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have shaped and left it--where the sculpture, and the painting, and the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of nature, go on under the naked eye of the Almighty, and by his own visible and uninterrupted hand, and where the music of nature, from the anthem of the torrent and storm, broken only by the scream of the vulture, to the trill of the rivulet with its accompaniment of singing birds and winds, is for ever ringing its changes, as if for the stars to hear--in such scenes, I say, and in such scenes only, is the imagination overtasked or stretched to the capacity of a seraph's; and while common minds sink beneath them to the mere inanition of their animal senses, the loftier spirit t...