PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, AND COLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. 1835. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1835, By HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York. 6174 LETTERS FROM THE SOUTH. LETTER XXII. DEAR FRANK, THE other day, in taking a ramble from the spring, I came to where a fine trout stream of a most promising appearance skirted the foot of a long rambling hill. The sight of this brook revived my old propensity for fishing, which I ascribe to having early in life fallen in with honest Isaac Walton's work on angling; to my mind, one of the most pleasant books in the language. He mingles so much of a taste for natural beauty, so much of poetical feeling and description, and so much genuine simplicity, with his art, that one can't help loving the honest fisherman. The book begins with a dialogue between a fowler, a hunter, and an angler; in which each endeavours to establish the superiority of his favourite amusement. Honest Walton, as might be expected, gives the best of the argument to the latter, who, I remember, demonstrates the superiority of his art by proving that a majority of the apostles were fishermen. I borrowed a fishing-rod from a miller near by, and followed the brook some miles without catching |