A dozen will sit together in the same way, and there shall not be a dozen words spoken between them in an hour. With the women one's chance of conversation is still worse. It seemed as though the cares of the world had been too much for them, and that all talking excepting as to business--demands, for instance, on the servants for pickles for their children--had gone by the board. They were generally hard, dry, and melancholy. I am speaking, of course, of aged females--from five and twenty, perhaps, to thirty--who had long since given up the amusements and levities of life. I very soon abandoned any attempt at drawing a word from these ancient mothers of families; but not the less did I ponder in my mind over the circumstances of their lives. Had things gone with them so sadly--was the struggle for independence so hard--that all the softness of existence had been trodden out of them? In the cities, too, it was much the same. It seemed to me that a future mother of a family, in those parts, had left all laughter behind her when she put out her finger for the wedding ring.
For these reasons I must say that life on board these steamboats was not as pleasant as I had hoped to find it; but for our discomfort in this respect we found great atonement in the scenery through which we passed. I protest that of all the river scenery that I know that of the Upper Mississippi is by far the finest and the most continued. One thinks, of course, of the Rhine; but, according to my idea of beauty, the Rhine is nothing to the Upper Mississippi. For miles upon miles--for hundreds of miles--the course of the river runs through low hills, which are there called bluffs. These bluffs rise in every imaginable form, looking sometimes like large, straggling, unwieldy castles, and then throwing themselves into sloping lawns which stretch back away from the river till the eye is lost in their twists and turnings.
Landscape beauty, as I take it, consists mainly in four attributes--in water; in broken land; in scattered timber, timber scattered as opposed to continuous forest timber; and in the accident of color.
In all these particulars the banks of the Upper Mississippi can hardly be beaten. There are no high mountains; but high mountains themselves are grand rather than beautiful. There are no high mountains; but there is a succession of hills, which group themselves forever without monotony. It is, perhaps, the ever-variegated forms of these bluffs which chiefly constitute the wonderful loveliness of this river. The idea constantly occurs that some point on every hillside would form the most charming site ever yet chosen for a noble residence. I have passed up and down rivers clothed to the edge with continuous forest. This at first is grand enough, but the eye and feeling soon become weary. Here the trees are scattered so that the eye passes through them, and ever and again a long lawn sweeps back into the country and up the steep side of a hill, making the traveler long to stay there and linger through the oaks, and climb the bluffs, and lay about on the bold but easy summits. The boat, however, steams quickly up against the current, and the happy valleys are left behind one quickly after another. The river is very various in its breadth, and is constantly divided by islands. It is never so broad that the beauty of the banks is lost in the distance or injured by it.
It is rapid, but has not the beautifully bright color of some European rivers--of the Rhine, for instance, and the Rhone. But what is wanting in the color of the water is more than compensated by the wonderful hues and luster of the shores. We visited the river in October, and I must presume that they who seek it solely for the sake of scenery should go there in that month. It was not only that the foliage of the trees was bright with every imaginable color, but that the grass was bronzed and that the rocks were golden. And this beauty did not last only for awhile, and then cease. On the Rhine there are lovely spots and special morsels of scenery with which the traveler becomes duly enraptured. But on the Upper Mississippi there are no special morsels. The position of the sun in the heavens will, as it always does, make much difference in the degree of beauty. The hour before and the half hour after sunset are always the loveliest for such scenes. But of the shores themselves one may declare that they are lovely throughout those four hundred miles which run immediately south from St. Paul.
About half way between La Crosse and St. Paul we came upon Lake Pepin, and continued our course up the lake for perhaps fifty or sixty miles. This expanse of water is narrow for a lake, and, by those who know the lower courses of great rivers, would hardly be dignified by that name. But, nevertheless, the breadth here lessens the beauty. There are the same bluffs, the same scattered woodlands, and the same colors. But they are either at a distance, or else they are to be seen on one side only. The more that I see of the beauty of scenery, and the more I consider its elements, the stronger becomes my conviction that size has but little to do with it, and rather detracts from it than adds to it. Distance gives one of its greatest charms, but it does so by concealing rather than displaying an expanse of surface. The beauty of distance arises from the romance, the feeling of mystery which it creates.
It is like the beauty of woman, which allures the more the more that it is vailed. But open, uncovered land and water, mountains which simply rise to great heights, with long, unbroken slopes, wide expanses of lake, and forests which are monotonous in their continued thickness, are never lovely to me. A landscape should always be partly vailed, and display only half its charms.