two or three dismembered columns, seems set in a wall of verdure, as if it were a piece of subterranean architecture, exposed by the washing away of the earth, which had then been sloped and terraced about it by the hand of art, and planted with the finest grasses, while the trees were so distributed as to impart the most picturesque effect. Indeed, the orchard-like appearance of these slopes, sweeping in curves of enchanting beauty to the water's edge, is the most surprising feature in the landscape. For scores of miles you may see no sign of population, and yet many of these hills appear like the outskirts of a nobleman's park, carefully kept free from under-brush and matted vegetation, and rounded by some landscape gardener to gratify the eye of taste. Here and there a sort of dimple is scooped in the hill; or you see two noble hills nearly meet at their bases, leaving a hollow between, like a lap, to receive the treasures of fertility which the land is ready to pour down. The charm of vegetation, which a luxuriant soil imparts, is spread like a mantle over these bluffs. You look in vain for a bleak or barren point. When the bluffs sink on one side of the river, they reäppear on the other; and this peculiarity continues, with a few exceptions, (as at Lake Pepin,) till you reach the pine region above the mouth of the St. Croix.
A hundred miles from the Falls of St. Anthony, you pass through Lake Pepin, which is merely an expansion of the Mississippi, about twenty-four miles long, and from two to four miles wide. It is rightly named a lake, however; as the characteristics of the river are here greatly modified. There is no perceptible current. The low islands, covered with rank vegetation, and annually overflowed and abraded by the brimming river, here entirely disappear. There is not an island in Lake Pepin. There are bluffs on both sides, which slope down cleanly to the water's edge, leaving a narrow rim of sand, but no marshy bottom-land between.
At one point, on the Wisconsin shore, the bluffs recede, and a beautiful platform of land extends before them, dotted with trees. On the Minnesota shore the line of bluffs is at one place thrown back to make way for a prairie, on the back-ground of which Nature has lavished all that can be imagined of the picturesque in the scenery of hill and dale. Here and there along the summit-line of majestic
