towns and counties, or to any mark drawn by the hand of society upon the face of a country, would seem only right and proper; but except in extraordinary cases growing out of some peculiar connection, another class of words appears much better fitted to the natural features of the land, its rivers, lakes, and hills. There is a grandeur, a sublimity, about a mountain especially, which should ensure it, if possible, a poetical, or at least an imaginative name. Consider a mountain peak, stern and savage, veiled in mist and cloud, swept by the storm and the torrent, half-clad in the wild verdure of the evergreen forest, and say if it be not a miserable dearth of words and ideas, to call that grand pile by the name borne by some honorable gentleman just turning the corner, in “honest broadcloth, close buttoned to the chin.” Indeed, if we except the man in the moon, whose face is made up of hills, and that stout Atlas of old, who bore the earth on his shoulder, no private individual would seem to make out a very clear claim to bestow his name upon a vast, rocky pile. Perhaps a certain Anthony, whose nose meets us so boldly in more than one place, might prove a third exception, provided one could clearly make out his identity. But generally it must be admitted that this connection between a mountain and a man, reminds one rather unpleasantly of that between the mountain and the mouse.
Doubtless it is no easy task to name a whole country. Those gentlemen who devote themselves to making geographical discoveries, who penetrate into unknown deserts, and cross seas where pilots have never been before them, encounter so many hardships, and have so many labors to occupy their attention, that we cannot wonder if they are generally satisfied with giving the first tolerable name which occurs to them; and it is perhaps only
