America is the land of prodigies Everything there assumes gigantic proportions, which startle the imagination and confound the reason. Mountains, rivers, lakes and streams, all are carved on a sublime pattern. There is a river of North America-not like the Danube, Rhine, or Rhone, whose banks are covered with towns, plantations, and time-worn castles: whose sources and tributaries are magnificent streams, the waters of which, confined in a narrow bed, rush onwards as if impatient to lose themselves in the ocean-but deep and silent, wide as an arm of the sea, calm and severe in its grandeur, it pours majestically onwards, its waters augmented by innumerable streams, and lazily bathes the banks of a thousand isles, which it has formed of its own sediment.