chanics desert their business; retailers fling aside their yard sticks; doctors leave their patients to get well without them; lawyers take no cognizance of fees or special pleadings; wives leave husbands; schoolmasters empty their noisy urchins into the streets, to unlearn as much as they have learnt: all for the sake of "going into the country." Nor is this all pastors desert their flocks, and the flocks run away from their pastors, leaving the faithful messengers who do remain to preach with countenances melancholy as Jeremiah, to empty seats and bare walls. They might indeed exclaim, "How does the city sit solitary that was full of people; and how have the houses become desolate that were full of children!" The husbands are the chief sufferers in this passion for family travelling. Remaining at home, to guard with care the interests by which the family is sustained, he feels keenly the solitude of his empty halls and chambers; he stalks gloomily about, catching one meal here and another there. You can almost read it in his countenance that he is a bereaved man; and when you ask him after the welfare of his family, he answers with a sigh, "they've gone in the country." It was not always so. In soberer days the city was deemed quite as healthy as the country; and people were aware that the sun beat down as powerfully upon the dust and sand of a country village, or upon the loom and gravel of a highway, as in town. These thoughts and notices, thus cast together, on watering-places and travelling excursions, may serve to apprise our young and pleasure-loving friends that there is now a new era, a love of display and motion, not cherished among us until very recently; at the same time, the love of travel and observation, well understood, is of most commendable character. To those who are intellectually qualified to profit by an observant eye, peering into every thing, "Nature, exhaustless, still has power to warm, THE ERIE CANAL. "The traveller with wonder sees The white sail gleaming through the dusky trees, And doubts the magic scenes which round him rise." THIS grand Canal, the proud monument of the enterprize and public spirit of New-York, although not properly an affair of sufficient age to demand a special chapter in the present work, yet as it has stretched its long length through a long line of forest waste, which till then lay for many a mile in its pristine gloom and wilderness, it has therefore become a matter of proper interest to describe and compare the past with the present. A tourist making his pleasant journey along the line of the present canal, seeing thriving villages, productive farms, and a dense population along its margin, could scarcely conceive that this advancement in wealth and civilization had been the work of only fifteen years. In the year 1819, when this great work was first set-to with effective operation, the then little settlements were "few and far between ;" the advance settlers but rude and poor; and the country in general unsubdued and wild. The wolf still prowled; the catamount still sprang on its prey; the bear still growled in his den. When we contemplate the present in comparison with the past, so recent too is all this change, the mind is lost in wonder and admiration at the improving power and hand of man. The canal itself has not only grown into a source of immense profit to the state, but it has diffused wealth and comfort throughout all the former waste regions of the West. When we consider too, how many obstacles, both natural and moral, stood in prevention of its incipient beginning, we must feel peculiar gratitude to the ceaseless and untiring efforts of those first projectors and promoters, who persevered in its progress and execution. At first, numerous writers and speakers resisted the endeavour; they predicted it could not be achieved, they deemed it impossible to surmount such impediments as lay in its way. Finally, however, we see that they who had the hardihood to offer a new theory, have had the success to make all men think with them and to join in their commendation. The name of De Witt Clinton will long stand pre-eminent, as a bold and munificent patron of this great and productive enterprize. This great canal traverses a country 360 miles in length, extending from Albany to Buffalo, a port on Lake Erie, and sometimes called, in the prospective hope of its increase and prosperity, the "New-York of the Lakes." In marking the prominent facts of this canal, beginning at Albany and going westward, we shall first notice the great difficulties overcome at the Cohoes' Fall, there lifting the boats, in the course of two miles, 100 feet by the aid of twelve locks. This may look like an easy affair now, but consider the men, the labour, and the money it once cost to produce the result. At the Little Falls it again ascends 40 feet by 5 locks of 8 feet. The country here is wildly romantic and ruggid; and patient and persevering was the toil near here to excavate, from the overhanging and tremendous cliffs of granite, a passage for boats along its impending brow. Thence, ascending 57 feet by 7 locks, it arrives at the dividing ridge near Rome; a ridge which from its height, forms a barrier which divides the waters that flow into Lake Ontario from those which flow into the Hudson. This "summit height," so called at Rome, is just 417 feet rise from the Hudson, overcome chiefly by 52 locks in the course of 100 miles. In traversing the country along the valley of the Mohawk, the canal has been made for many miles along the bed of that river, to avoid the great projections and points of hills jutting out into the river occasionally, especially at the Cohoes and Little Falls. At one place, four miles eastward of Schenectady, the canal crosses the river by an aqueduct 850 feet long and 21 feet high. What an object to contemplate for its grandeur, for its triumph. as a measure of art. At Rochester another great aqueduct crosses the Genessee of 800 feet length, resting on 11 arches, and being just 500 feet above the Hudson and 64 feet below the waters of Lake Erie. The first portion of the canal completed and put into productive use, was the line of 174 miles from Utica to Rochester, first set in operation in the year 1822. Although so recent, yet it was made through regions so purely in a state of nature, that long sections of the route seemed almost beyond human might to subdue. The Cayuga marshes near Senecca river were still in their primeval waste. There 2,000 men at a time struggled to force a passage, and only succeeded at the peril of losing several lives, and having one half their number made sick by toil and unhealthy exposure. Now contemplate the same regions, made fruitful, healthy, and prosperous. There, too, we notice the "Long Level" so called, stretching from Utica to Montezuma, 70 miles, without a lock. A rare circumstance, without a parallel in the world, except so far as nearly equalled by itself at the other extremity of the canal from Rochester to Lockport, where the "Genessee Level" runs 65 miles unobstructed by any locks. Arrived at Senecca river, the canal is made to pass through the river, having a towing path of articial construction along its side of three quarters of a mile in length. By and bye, proceeding westward through a country abounding in lakes, and redeeming and profiting the regions around, we arrive at the striking monument of human toil and industry-the "high embankment" of Irondequat, it being a stupendous mound of earth traversing the creek of that name over a culvert of 24 feet cord and 250 feet length. At an elevation of 70 feet of embankment, extending a mile in length, the beholder, filled with sublime emotions, sees himself lifted into mid-air, and peacefully and safely gliding along the bosom of the still canal, looking down many feet to the tops of the forests |