suppose, its strategic importance and its place in history. I climbed to its highest point, and looked out, at sunset, over the burnished river and the Louisiana shore beyond. It seemed one unbroken stretch of dark forest, which might never have been threaded by human foot, or only by that of the Red Man. When the first explorer of the great river climbed the bluff (as he doubtless did), he must have surveyed no very different scene. The town, too, had a touch of the primitive South about it which I had not hitherto encountered. Memphis was as civilized and modern as any Northern city; but Vicksburg, with its steep-climbing streets, its cavernous, dimly-lighted shops, and its lounging outdoor life, had something of the air of an Italian hill-town. The principal hotel was a gaunt, dingy caravanserai, with no pretence to modernity about it. Here, and here only, I may say, I found the Northern 86allegation justified, that the South had lagged behind the age in things material. 86 An odd little incident brought home to me vividly the width of the empire of English literature. |Madrigals by the Mississippi.| At a street corner a sharp-featured Yankee youth, mounted on a large cart, was carrying on a book-auction, with a great deal of lively patter. As I passed, a familiar phrase fell upon my ear: |Madrigals by the Mississippi.| | | I stopped and heard him read, not without understanding, the whole of Marlowe’s canzonet. It carried me back from the Mississippi to the Cherwell and the Chess; but what did it mean, I wonder, to the little crowd of loafers, half white, half black, that surrounded his stall? Then, with a little more patter, he modulated into and I left him stumbling over the accentuation of Passing the same way half an hour later, I heard him thus deliver himself: “Here y’are—Dr. Johnson’s great work ‘Rasselas’! Seventy-five cents for ‘Rasselas’! He was Prince of Abyssinia—that’s a country in West Africa where they’s a powerful lot o’ coloured folks.” But there was, 87in the phrase of the country, nothing doing in “Rasselas.” I saw only one actual transaction concluded—a negro could not resist the allurement of “Doré’s Bible Gallery,” on which he lavished three shillings. 87 Next morning
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