In the future poetry of America, Lake George will hold the place of Loch Katrine in Scotland. The best idea that can be given of it, indeed, to a person who has seen Loch Katrine, is to say, that it is the Trosachs on a little larger scale. There is the same remarkably clear water in both,—the same jutting and bold shores, small green islands, and bright vegetation; and the same profusion of nooks and bays. It struck me at Loch Katrine, that the waters seemed to have overflowed the dells of an undulating country, and left nothing visible but the small green hilltops loaded with vegetation. The impression was owing, no doubt, to the reach of the shrubs and grass to the very edge of the water; and the same thing produces the same effect at Lake George. When the bosom of the lake is tranquil, the small islands, with their reflections below, look like globes of heaped-up leaves suspended in the air.

The extraordinary purity of the waters of Lake George procured for it the name of Lake Sacrament; and every stranger is struck with their singular transparency. It is singular, that the waters on every side of it,—those of Lake Champlain, for example, of the Hudson, and of the whole region between the Green Mountains and the Mississippi,—are more or less impregnated with lime, while Lake George alone is pellucid and pure. It receives its waters, probably, from subjacent springs.

It must be allowed that the site which our ancestors adopted for the foundation of an University was not chosen with any reference to its adaptation to nautical exercises. Originally a scanty streamlet choked with mud and sedge and almost dry four months in the year, the Cam has been formed into an artificial canal by the hand of man and has been economically adapted to the wants of the coal-barges, to which it now affords a means of transit. Its width therefore is pretty uniformly from twenty to twenty-five yards; a channel about seven feet in depth is scooped in the centre, the water being often very shallow at some distance from the banks. The nearest lock is a quarter of a mile below the town, and the various boat-houses are ranged along the river side beyond it. It is now only twelve years since the naval armaments of Cambridge consisted almost entirely of funnies and canoes, large fleets of which were wont, on a calm summer evening, to glide down the stream and disport themselves on the bosom of the broad reach opposite Chesterton. In those days there was a lock immediately below that village, only one mile from Cambridge, which has lately been removed. The spirit of adventure seldom prompted the solitary mariners of those frail vessels to burst its frowning barriers.

It strikes the European traveller, at the first burst of the scenery of America on his eye, that the New World of Columbus is also a new world from the hand of the Creator. In comparison with the old countries of Europe, the vegetation is so wondrously lavish, the outlines and minor features struck out with so bold a freshness, and the lakes and rivers so even in their fulness and flow, yet so vast and powerful, that he may well imagine it an Eden newly sprung from the ocean. The Minerva-like birth of the republic of the United States, its sudden rise to independence, wealth, and power, and its continued and marvellous increase in population and prosperity, strike him with the same surprise, and leave the same impression of a new scale of existence, and a fresher and faster law of growth and accomplishment. The interest, with regard to both the natural and civilized features of America, has very much increased within a few years; and travellers, who have exhausted the unchanging countries of Europe, now turn their steps in great numbers to the novel scenery, and ever-shifting aspects of this.

The picturesque views of the United States suggest a train of thought directly opposite to that of similar objects of interest in other lands. There, the soul and centre of attraction in every picture is some ruin of the past.

COLLEGE BOOKS

The Books of the Colleges present several forms, each having its own object,–“in conservationem omnium rationum annalium evidentiarum et pandectarum, quæ commentarium rerum gestarum latino nomine dicimus, præter librum matriculationis”;–most of them are the registers of proceedings in the several branches of the corporate economy: each College Officer has one or more of them under his charge and for his regulation in the department to which he is appointed. The Bursar's department presents a collection truly voluminous, but very uninviting to the general reader. The assertion of rights, description of titles and boundaries, negotiations in bargains and suits, account of receipt and expenditure, hold out small promise except to those closely connected with the system. Their contents have little charm for the philosophical historian, though they may before now have engaged the interest of a curious and indefatigable arithmetician. But the department of the Registrar (Secretarius Registri) is more promising; albeit to ensure regularity and certainty, dry form has been prescribed and adhered to, yet the scribe has occasionally caught the spirit of his office, and under the influence of ‘pia memoria’, personal admiration, or esprit de corps, or even a sense of the humourous, has infringed an official formality by annotating a singular coincidence, recording a feeling of the time, or marking a valuable historical fact.