Chapter 27

Chapter 27
Some Imported Articles

WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight
at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi.
The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--
and depressing. League after league, and still league after league,
it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls,
its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving
object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony
of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes,
and again the day--and still the same, night after night
and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity,
repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity,
realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet,
and longed for by the good and thoughtless!

Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come
to America, from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort
of procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding,
patient march through the land during many, many years.
Each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book--
a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind;
but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors.
A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its
aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those
strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then.
The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects
were not all formed on one pattern, of course; they HAD
to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists
were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older
countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors.
And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in
the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to
manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall.
R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says--

'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished
to behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all
the trouble I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at
the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything.
But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times,
that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.'

Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months later
in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi--

'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance
of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters,
and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf.