It reaches the Mississippi, but to be swallowed up and engulfed by that turbid and rapid stream, which, like some gaping, gigantic monster, running wild from the Rocky Mountains and the Itasca summit, stands ready to gulp it down.

The scene is truly magnificent, and the struggle not slight.

For more than twenty miles, the transparent blue waters of the Ohio are crowded along the Tennessee coast; but the Mississippi, swollen by its summer flood, as if disdainful of its rural and peace-like properties, gains the mastery before reaching Memphis, and carries its characteristic of turbid geologic power for a thousand miles more, until its final exit into the Mexican Gulf.
I had never seen such a sight.

I had lost all my standards of comparison.

Compared to it, my little home streams would not fill a pint cup; and, like a man suddenly ushered into a new world, I was amazed at the scene before me.