FullReads

As we neared Point Levi, opposite Quebec, we got our first view of the St. Lawrence. “Iliad of rivers!” exclaimed my friend. “Yet unsung!” The Hudson must take a back seat now, and a good way back. One of the two or three great watercourses of the globe is before you. No other river, I imagine, carries such a volume of pure cold water to the sea. Nearly all its feeders are trout and salmon streams, and what an airing and what a bleaching it gets on its course! Its history, its antecedents, are unparalleled. The great lakes are its camping-grounds; here its hosts repose under the sun and stars in areas like that of states and kingdoms, and it is its waters that shake the earth at Niagara. Where it receives the Saguenay it is twenty miles wide, and when it debouches into the Gulf it is a hundred. Indeed, it is a chain of Homeric sublimities from beginning to end. The great cataract is a fit sequel to the great lakes; the spirit that is born in vast and tempestuous Superior takes its full glut of power in that fearful chasm. If paradise is hinted in the Thousand Islands, hell is unveiled in that pit of terrors.

Its last escapade is the great rapids above Montreal, down which the steamer shoots with its breathless passengers, after which, inhaling and exhaling its mighty tides, it flows calmly to the sea.

The St. Lawrence is the type of nearly all the Canadian rivers, which are strung with lakes and rapids and cataracts, and are full of peril and adventure.

Here we reach the oldest part of the continent, geologists tell us; and here we encounter a fragment of the Old World civilization. Quebec presents the anomaly of a mediaeval European city in the midst of the American landscape. This air, this sky, these clouds, these trees, the look of these fields, are what we have always known; but the houses, and streets, and vehicles, and language, and physiognomy are strange. As I walked upon the grand terrace I saw the robin and kingbird and song sparrow, and there in the tree, by the Wolfe Monument, our summer warbler was at home. I presently saw, also, that our republican crow was a British subject, and that he behaved here more like his European brother than he does in the States, being less wild and suspicious. On the Plains of Abraham excellent timothy grass was growing and cattle were grazing. We found a path through the meadow, and, with the exception of a very abundant weed with a blue flower, saw nothing new or strange,–nothing but the steep tin roofs of the city and its frowning wall and citadel. Sweeping around the far southern horizon, we could catch glimpses of mountains that were evidently in Maine or New Hampshire; while twelve or fifteen miles to the north the Laurentian ranges, dark and formidable, arrested the eye. Quebec, or the walled part of it, is situated on a point of land shaped not unlike the human foot, looking northeast, the higher and bolder side being next the river, with the main part of the town on the northern slope toward the St. Charles. Its toes are well down in the mud where this stream joins the St. Lawrence, while the citadel is high on the instep and commands the whole field. The grand Battery is a little below, on the brink of the instep, so to speak, and the promenader looks down several hundred feet into the tops of the chimneys of this part of the lower town, and upon the great river sweeping by northeastward like another Amazon. The heel of our misshapen foot extends indefinitely toward Montreal. Upon it, on a level with the citadel, are the Plains of Abraham. It was up its high, almost perpendicular, sides that Wolfe clambered with his army, and stood in the rear of his enemy one pleasant September morning over a hundred years ago.