standing, but entirely leafless and dead, and presenting such an aspect of desolation as is painful to the mind, even when sunshine, and the flourishing maize at their roots, invest them with a milder and more cheerful character.  Such prospects are common enough in all new American clearings, where the husbandman is content to deprive the trees of life, by girdling, and then leave them to the assaults of the elements and the natural course of decay; and where a thousand trunks, of the gigantic growth of the West, are thus seen rising together in the air, naked and hoary with age, they impress the imagination with such gloom as is engendered by the sight of ruined colonnades.

Such was the case with the present prospect; years had passed since the axe had sapped the strength of the mighty oaks and beeches; bough after bough, and limb after limb, had fallen to the earth, with here and there some huge trunk itself, overthrown by the blast, and now rotting among weeds on the soil which it cumbered.  At the present hour, the spectacle was peculiarly mournful and dreary.  The deep solitude of the spot,—­the hour itself,—­the gloomy aspect of the sky veiled in clouds,—­the occasional rush of the wind sweeping like a tempest through the woods, to be succeeded by a dead and dismal calm,—­the roll of distant thunder reverberating among-the hills,—­but, more than all, the remembrance of the tragical event that had consigned the ill-fated settlement to neglect and desolation, gave the deepest character of gloom to the scene.

As the travellers entered upon the clearing, there occurred one of those casualties which so often increase the awe of the looker-on, in such places.  In one of the deepest lulls and hushes of the wind, when there was no apparent cause in operation to produce such an effect, a tall and majestic trunk was seen to decline from the perpendicular, topple slowly through the air, and then fall to the earth with a crash like the shock of an earthquake.

The poet and the moralising philosopher may find food for contemplation in such a scene and such a catastrophe.  He may see, in the lofty and decaying trunks, the hoary relics and representatives of a generation of better and greater spirits than those who lead the destinies of his own,—­spirits, left not more as monuments of the past than as models for the imitation of the present; he may contrast their majestic serenity and rest, their silence and immovableness, with the turmoil of the greener growth around, the uproar and collision produced by every gust, and trace the resemblance to the scene where the storms of party, rising among the sons, hurtle so indecently around the gray fathers of the republic, whose presence should stay them; and, finally, he may behold in the trunks, as they yield at last to decay, and sink one by one to the earth, the fall of each aged parent of his country,—­a fall, indeed, as of an oak of a thousand generations, shocking the earth around, and producing for a moment, wonder, awe, grief, and then a long forgetfulness.