THE DISMAL SWAMP.

AT the last visit which I paid to my old friend Mr. De Viellecour, in Westchester, I was looking, after dinner, at a spirited little drawing intended to illustrate Moore's popular verses on the Dismal Swamp. It was a present made to the old gentleman by a young friend of his, an artist of rare talent and high promise, and had all the spirit and taste which mark every thing, great and small, from his hand. Yet it struck me at once that this drawing was very like the poetry it was designed from-both of them very beautiful in their way, and yet both of them bearing evidence on their faces that neither poet nor painter had ever seen the Dismal Swamp. I could not help saying so. "After all, Mr. De Viellecour," said I, resting my elbow on the mantel-piece, and looking alternately at the

drawing which hung over it, and the old gentleman who in compliment to a silent gentlemanly visitor of old blood, who took his glass in silence as often as the bottle was passed, still kept his seat at the head of his well polished mahogany table. By the way, I love those old, dark, shining, clumsy mahogany tables, which have the marks of half a century's rubbing and polishing upon them. They are indissolubly associated in my mind with recollections of frank, unostentatious hospitality, temperate good cheer, rational good talk, and a thousand other good things, of which more stylish modern furniture never reminds me. If I continue in the mood of publishing an annual volume, I shall hereafter write an essay on that subject. But, to return-" After all," said I," how little can genius or skill, either in literature, poetry, or art, make up for the absence of plain matter-of-fact knowledge? Our young friend here, has made out of the Dismal Swamp a delicious little sketch, and Tom Moore's verses on the same subject are the prettiest in the world. But what idea does either artist or poet impart of the dignity, the majesty, the solemnity, and the singularity of the real scene? If either of them had ever seen the great swamp itself, as I saw it in the spring of 18—, when I accompanied the Virginia canal commissioners and their engi

neers, on an exploring party through part of it, they would have done it more justice. I cannot say what difference in its picturesque effect the woodman, the timber-merchant, the canal, and other improvements of late years may have made. The Swamp may be as different now from what it was then, as the Passaic Falls are; since they have been dug down and filled up, with canals on one side and side cuts on the other, from what they were when you and I and Washington Irving used to admire them together in their native rudeness. When I visited the Dismal Swamp it was one of the noblest scenes in the worldsomewhat monotonous to be sure, but wonderfully majestic, magnificent, and peculiar. I well recollect its marshy border on the south, thickly grown up with immense reeds, and as far as the eye could take it in, waving slowly and heavily in one green vegetable sea. Then, on all the other skirts of the forest itself, the lofty trees were covered to their summits by the yellow jessamine, and other luxuriant vines, breathing odour, and alive with the chirping of insects and the melody of birds. In the open and less marshy skirts of the vast forest, gigantic tulip trees (the southern poplar) shot up their massive and regular trunks, straight and pillar-like, until they put forth their broad arms covered with the magnifi