We met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive -- and depressing. League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day -- and still the same, night after night and day after day -- majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy -- symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!

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