Gustave Aimard

“ There is a river of North America—not like the Danube, Rhine, or Rhone, whose banks are covered with towns, plantations, and time-worn castles: whose sources and tributaries are magnificent streams, the waters of which, confined in a narrow bed, rush onwards as if impatient to lose themselves in the ocean—but deep and silent, wide as an arm of the sea, calm and severe in its grandeur, it pours majestically onwards, its waters augmented by innumerable streams, and lazily bathes the banks of a thousand isles, which it has formed of its own sediment. ”

“ The moon, almost departed, only cast over the landscape an uncertain and timorous gleam, which, in lieu of dissipating the gloom, only rendered the darkness visible, through the striking contrasts between the obscurity and the pale and fugitive rays of the declining planet. ”

“ Man has in himself the germ of good and evil; if you suffer, you have only yourself to blame. You are young, intelligent, powerful, the first of your nation: what do you want for happiness? Nothing. If you wish to be so permanently, stifle in your heart that insensate passion which devours it, and follow, without looking to the right or left, the glorious mission you have traced for yourself. What can be more noble or grander than the deliverance and regeneration of a people? ”