This summer, as you may conjecture, has been very noisy with us,
and productive of little,--the "Wind-dust-ry of all Nations"
involving everything in one inane tornado. The very shopkeepers
complain that there is no trade. Such a sanhedrim of windy fools
from all countries of the Globe were surely never gathered in one
city before. But they will go their ways again, they surely
will! One sits quiet in that faith;--nay, looks abroad with a
kind of pathetic grandfatherly feeling over this universal
Children's Ball which the British Nation in these extraordinary
circumstances is giving it self! Silence above all, silence is
very behoveful! I read lately a small old brown French
duodecimo, which I mean to send you by the first chance there is.
The writer is a Capitaine Bossu; the production, a Journal of
his experiences in "La Louisiane," "Oyo" (_Ohio_), and those
regions, which looks very genuine, and has a strange interest to
me, like some fractional Odyssey or letter.* Only a hundred
years ago, and the Mississippi has changed as never valley did:
in 1751 older and stranger, looked at from its present date, than
Balbec or Nineveh! Say what we will, Jonathan is doing miracles
(of a sort) under the sun in these times now passing.
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