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NEWFOUNDLAND.—St. JOHNS.

When the mist dispersed, the rocky shores of Newfoundland were close upon our left—lofty cliffs, red and gray, terribly beaten by the waves of the broad ocean. We amused ourselves, as we passed abreast the bays and headlands and rugged islands, with gazing at the wild scene, and searching out the beauty timidly reposing among the bleak and desolate. On the whole, Newfoundland, to the voyager from the States, is a lean and bony land, in thin, ragged clothes, with the smallest amount of ornament. Along the sides of the dull, brown mountains there is a suspicion of verdure, spotted and striped here and there with meagre woods of birch and fir. The glory of this hard region is its coast: a wonderful perplexity of fiords, bays and creeks, islands, peninsulas and capes, endlessly picturesque, and very often magnificently grand. Nothing can well exceed the headlands and precipices, honey-combed, shattered, and hollowed out into vast caverns, and given up to the thunders and the fury of the deep-sea billows. Read the Pirate of Scott again, and Sumburg Head will picture for you numbers of heads, of which it is not important to mention the name. The brooks that flow from the highlands, and fall over cliffs of great elevation into the very surf, and that would be counted features of grandeur in some countries, are here the merest trifles, a kind of jewelry on the hem of the landscape.

The harbor of St. Johns is certainly one of the most remarkable for bold and effective scenery on the Atlantic shore. The pictures of it, which of late abound, and are quite truthful as miniature portraits, fail entirely to suggest the grand expression and strong character of the coast. We were moving spiritedly forward over a bright and lively sea, watching the stern headlands receding in the south, and starting out to view in the north, when we passed Cape Spear, a lofty promontory, crowned with a light-house and a signal-shaft, upon which was floating the meteor-flag of England, and at once found ourselves abreast the bay in front of St. Johns. Not a vestige, though, of any thing like a city was in sight, except another flag flitting on a distant pinnacle of rock. Like a mighty Coliseum, the sea-wall half encircled the deep water of this outer bay, into which the full power of the ocean let itself under every wind except the westerly. Right towards the coast where it gathered itself up into the greatest massiveness, and tied itself into a very Gordian knot, we cut across, curious to behold when and where the rugged adamant was going to split and let us through. At length it opened, and we looked through, and presently glided through a kind of mountain-pass, with all the lonely grandeur of the Franconia Notch. Above us, and close above, the rugged, brown cliffs rose to a fine height, armed at certain points with cannon, and before us, to all appearance, opened out a most beautiful mountain lake, with a little city looking down from the mountain side, and a swamp of shipping along its shores. We were in the harbor, and before St. Johns. As we bade adieu to the sea, and hailed the land with our plucky little gun, the echoes rolled among the hills, and rattled along the rocky galleries of the mountains in the finest style. We were quite delighted. So fresh and novel was the prospect, so unexpected were the peculiar sentiment and character of the scene, one could hardly realize that it was old to the experience of tens of thousands. I could scarcely help feeling, there was stupidity somewhere, that more had not been said about what had been seen by so many for so long a time.