United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The relative population of the country situated between the eastern bank of the Mississippi and the Atlantic states is scarcely 47; while that of Connecticut, Rhode island, and Massachusetts is more than 800. Westward of the Mississippi as well as in the interior of Spanish Guiana there are not two inhabitants to the square league over much larger extents of territory than Switzerland or Belgium.

Calling to mind the account of my voyage on the Orinoco, it may be easy to appreciate the obstacles which nature opposes to the efforts of man in hot and humid climates. In Mexico, large extents of soil are destitute of springs; rain seldom falls, and the want of navigable rivers impedes communication.

And when at last the harvest-time was come and its fruits were to be ingathered Germany felt that she could count to varying extents on the active sympathy and support of governments, parliaments and nations; on the Turks, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Bulgarians, the Roumanians; on the autocratic ruler of the Greeks and on millions of American-Germans.

Your little Dutch landscape, which you put over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows tomorrow, is a far more contemptible piece of work than the extents of field and forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa; and the wild boar of silver which you use for a seal, or lock into a velvet case, is little likely to be so noble a beast as the bronze boar who foams forth the fountain from under his tusks in the market-place of Florence.

Great masses of ice have ground out, in their very slow progress towards the sea over the very slight incline northwards of that line, hollows innumerable, and varying from small pools to considerable lakes; the ice has left, upon a background of sand, patches of clay, which hold the waters of all this countryside in brown stretches of shallow mere, and in wider extents of marsh and bog.

"I spend delicious days in communings with the past; I summon before me whole countries, places, extents of sea, the fair faces of history. In my imaginary seraglio I have all the women that I have never possessed. Your wars and revolutions come up before me for judgment.