So we remained over Sunday in Quebec, and in the morning attended
service at the French Cathedral; and as we all had the American
accomplishments of the "Nonne, a Prioresse," who spoke French
"ful fayre and fetisly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
The Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe,"
it may be inferred that we were greatly edified by the service. From
the French, as one cannot have too much of a good thing, we proceeded
without pause to the English Cathedral,--cathedral by courtesy?--and
heard a sermon by a Connecticut bishop, which, however good, was a
disappointment, because we wanted the flavor of the soil. And after
dinner we walked on the high and sightly Durham terrace, and then went
to the Scotch church, joined in Scotch singing, and heard a broad
Scotch sermon. So we tried to worship as well as we could; but it is
impossible not to be sight-seeing where there are sights to see, and
for that matter I don't suppose there is any harm in it. You don't go
to a show; but if the church and the people and the minister are all a
show, what can you do about it?
As I sat listening in the French Cathedral to a service I but a quarter
comprehended, the residual three fourths of me went wandering at its
own sweet will, and queried why it is that a battle-ground should so
stir the blood, while a church suffers one to pass calmly and coldly
out through its portals. I do not believe it is total depravity; for
though the church stands for what is good, the battle-field does not
stand for all that is bad. The church does indeed represent man's
highest aspirations, his longings for holiness and heaven. But the
battle-field speaks not, I think, of retrogression. It is in the same
line as the church. It stands in the upward path. The church and its
influences are the dew and sunshine and spring rains that nourish a
gentle, wholesome growth. Battle is the mighty convulsion that marks a
geologic era. The fierce throes of battle upheave a continent. The
church clothes it with soft alluvium, adorns it with velvet verdure,
enriches it with fruits and grains, glorifies it with the beauty of
blooms. In the struggle all seems to be chaos and destruction; but
after each shock the elevation is greater. Perhaps it is that always
the concussion of the shock impresses, while the soft, slow, silent
constancy accustoms us and is unheeded; but I think there is another
cause. In any church you are not sure of sincerity, of earnestness.
Church building and church organization are the outgrowth of man's
wants, and mark his upward path; but you do not know of a certainty
whether this individual edifice represents life, or vanity,
ostentation, custom, thrift. You look around upon the worshippers in a
church, and you are not usually thrilled. You do not see the presence
and prevalence of an absorbing, exclusive idea. Devotion does not fix
them. They are diffusive, observant, often apparently indifferent,
sometimes positively EXHIBITIVE. They adjust their draperies, whisper
to their neighbors, took vacant about the mouth. The beat of a drum or
the bleat of a calf outside disturbs and distracts them. An untimely
comer dissipates their attention. They are floating, loose,
incoherent, at the mercy of trifles. The most inward, vital part of
religion does not often show itself in church, though it be nursed and
nurtured there. So when we go into an empty church, it is--empty.
Hopes, fears, purposes, ambitions, the eager hours of men, do not
pervade and penetrate those courts. The walls do not flame with the
fire of burning hearts. The white intensity of life may never have
glowed within them. No fragrance of intimate, elemental passion
lingers still. No fine aroma of being clings through the years and
suffuses you with its impalpable sweetness, its subtile strength. You
are not awed, because the Awful is not there. But on the battle-field
you have no doubt. Imagination roams at will, but in the domains of
faith. Realities have been there, and their ghosts walk up and down
forever. There men met men in deadly earnest. Right or wrong, they
stood face to face with the unseen, the inevitable. The great problem
awaited them, and they bent fiery souls to its solution. But one idea
moved them all and wholly. They threw themselves body and soul into
the raging furnace. All minor distractions were burned out. Every
self was fused and lost in one single molten flood, dashing madly
against its barrier to whelm in rapturous victory or be broken in sore
defeat.
And it is earnestness that utilizes the good. It is sincerity that
makes the bad not infernal.
Monday gave us the Indian village, more Indian-y than village-y,--and
the Falls of Lorette. For a description, see the Falls of Montmorency.
Lorette is more beautiful, I think, more wild, more varied, more
sympathetic,--not so precipitous, not so concentrated, not so forceful,
but more picturesque, poetic, sylvan, lovely. The descent is long,
broad, and broken. The waters flash and foam over the black rocks like
a white lace veil over an Ethiop belle, and then rush on to other
woodland scenes.
We left Quebec ignobly, crossing the river in a steamer to which the
eminently English adjective nasty can fitly apply,--a wheezy,
sputtering, black, crazy old craft, muddy enough throughout to have
been at the bottom of the river and sucked up again half a dozen times.
With care of the luggage, shawls, hackmen, and tickets, we all
contrived to become separated, and I found myself crushed into one
corner of a little Black Hole of Calcutta, with no chair to sit in, no
space to stand in, and no air to breathe, on the sultriest day that
Canada had known for years. What windows there were opened by swinging
inwards and upwards, which they could not do for the press, and after
you had got them up, there was no way to keep them there except to
stand and hold them at arm's length. So we waddled across the river.
Now we have all read of shipwrecks, and the moral grandeur of
resignation and calmness which they have developed. We have read of
drowning, and the gorgeous intoxication of the process. But there is
neither grandeur nor gorgeousness in drowning in a tub. If you must
sink, you at least would like to go down gracefully, in a stately ship,
in mid-ocean, in a storm and uproar, bravely, decorously, sublimely, as
the soldiers in Ravenshoe, drawn up in line, with their officers at
their head, waving to each other calm farewells. I defy anybody to be
graceful or heroic in plumping down to the bottom of a city river amid
a jam of heated, hurried, panting, angry passengers, mountains of
trunks, carpet-bags, and indescribable plunder, and countless
stratifications of coagulated, glutinous, or pulverized mud. To the
credit of human nature it must be said, that the sufferers kept the
peace with each other, though vigorously denouncing the unknown author
of all their woes. After an age of suffocation and fusion, there came
a stir which was a relief because it was a stir. Nobody seemed to know
the cause or consequence, but everybody moved; so I moved, and bobbing,
fumbling, groping through Egyptian darkness, stumbling over the beams,
crawling under the boilers, creeping through the steam-pipes, scalping
ourselves against the funnels, we finally came out gasping into the
blessed daylight. "Here you are!" exclaimed cheerily the voice of
Halicarnassus, as I went winking and blinking in the unaccustomed
light. "I began to think I had lost my cane,"--he had given it to me
when he went to look up the trunks. "Why?" I asked faintly, not yet
fully recovered from my long incarceration. "It is so long since I saw
you, that I thought you must have fallen overboard," was his gratifying
reply. I was still weak, but I gathered up my remaining strength and
plunged the head of the cane, a dog's head it was, into his heart. His
watch, or his Bible, or something interposed, and rescued him from the
fate he merited; and then we rode over the miserable, rickety farther
end of the Grand Trunk Railway, and reached Island Pond at
midnight,--in time to see the magnificent Northern Lights flashing,
flickering, wavering, streaming, and darting over the summer sky; and
as the people in the Pond were many and the rooms few, we had plenty of
time to enjoy the sight. It was exciting, fascinating, almost
bewildering; and feeling the mystic mood, I proposed to write a poem on
it, to which Halicarnassus said he had not the smallest objection,
provided he should not be held liable to read it, adding, as he offered
me his pencil, that it was just the thing,--he wanted some narcotic to
counteract the stimulus of the fresh cold air after the long and heated
ride, or he should get no sleep for the night.
I do not believe there is in our beautiful but distracted country a
single person who is the subject of so cold-blooded, unprovoked,
systematic, malignant neglect and abuse on any one point as the writer
of these short and simple annals on this. If there is one thing in the
whole range of human possibilities on which I pride myself, it is my
poetry. I cannot do much at prose. That requires a depth, an
equilibrium, a comprehension, a sagacity, a culture, which I do not
possess and cannot command. Nor in the domestic drudgery line, nor the
parlor ornament line, nor the social philanthropic line, nor the
ministering angel line, can I be said to have a determinate value. As
an investment, as an economic institution, as an available force, I
suppose I must be reckoned a failure; but I do write lovely poetry.
That I insist on: and yet, incredible as it may seem, of that one
little ewe lamb have I been repeatedly and remorselessly robbed by an
unscrupulous public, and a still more unscrupulous private. Whenever I
come into the room with a sheet of manuscript in my hand, Halicarnassus
glances at it, and if the lines are not all of the same length, he
finds at once that he has to go and shovel a path, or bank up the
cellar, or get in the wood, unless I have taken the precaution to lock
the door and put the key in my pocket. When, by force or fraud, I have
compelled a reluctant audience, he is sure to strike in by the time I
have got to the second stanza, breaking right into the middle of a
figure or a rapture, and asking how much more there is of it. I know of
few things better calculated to extinguish the poetic fire than this.
I regret to be obliged to say that Halicarnassus, by his persistent
hostility,--I believe I may say, persecution,--has disseminated his
plebeian prejudices over a very large portion of our joint community,
and my muse consequently is held in the smallest esteem. Not but that
whenever there is a church to be dedicated, or a centennial to be
celebrated, or a picnic to be sung, or a fair to be closed, I am called
on to furnish the poetry, which, with that sweetness of disposition
which forms a rare but fitting background to poetic genius, I
invariably do, to be praised and thanked for a week, and then to be
again as before told, upon the slightest provocation, "You better not
meddle with verses." "You stick to prose." "Verses are not your
forte." "You can't begin to come up with ----, and ----, and ----." On
that auroral night, crowned with the splendors of the wild mystery of
the North, I am sure that the muse awoke and stirred in the depths of
my soul, and needed but a word of recognition and encouragement to put
on her garland and singing robes, and pour forth a strain which the
world would not have willingly let die, and which I would have
transferred to these pages. But that word was not spoken. Scorn and
sarcasm usurped the throne of gentle cherishing, and the golden moment
passed away forever. It is as well. Perhaps it is better; for on
second thought, I recollect that the absurd prejudice I have mentioned
has extended itself to the editor of this Magazine,[*] who jerks me
down with a pitiless pull whenever I would soar into the
empyrean,--ruling out with a rod of iron every shred of poetry from my
pages, till I am reduced to the necessity of smuggling it in by writing
it in the same form as the rest when, as he tells poetry only by the
capitals and exclamation-points, he thinks it is prose, and lets it go.
[* The Atlantic Monthly]
Here, if I may be allowed, I should like to make a digression. In an
early stage of my journeying, I spoke of the pleasure I had taken in
reading "The Betrothal" and "The Espousals." I cannot suppose that it
is of any consequence to the world whether I think well or ill of a
poem, but the only way in which the world will ever come out right is
by everyone's putting himself right; and I don't wish even my influence
to seem to be thrown in favor of so objectionable a book as "Faithful
Forever," a continuation of the former poems by the same author.
Coventry Patmore's books generally are made up of poetry and prattle,
but the poetry makes you forgive the prattle. The tender, strong,
wholesome truths they contain steady the frail bark through dangerous
waters; but "Faithful Forever" is wrong, false, and pernicious, root
and branch, and a thorough misnomer besides. Frederic loves Honoria,
who loves and marries Arthur, leaving Frederic out in the cold;
whereupon Frederic turns round and marries Jane, knowing all the while
that he does not love her and does love Honoria. What kind of a
Faithful Forever is this? A man cannot love two women simultaneously,
whatever he may do consecutively. If he ceases to love the first, he
is surely not faithful forever. If he does not cease to love her, he
is false forever to the second,--and worse than false. Marrying from
pique or indifference or disappointment is one of the greatest crimes
that can be committed, as well as one of the greatest blunders that can
be made. The man who can do such a thing is a liar and a perjurer. I
can understand that people should give up the people they love, but
there is no possible shadow of excuse for their taking people whom they
don't love. It is no matter how inferior Jane may be to Frederic. A
woman can feel a good many things that she cannot analyze or
understand, and there never yet was a woman so stupid that she did not
know whether or not her husband loved her, and was not either stricken
or savage to find that he did not. No woman ever was born with a heart
so small that anything less than the whole of her husband's heart could
fill it.
Moreover, apart from unhappy consequences, there is a right and a wrong
about it. How dare a man stand up solemnly before God and his fellows
with a lie in his right hand? and if he does do it, how dare a poet or
a novelist step up and glorify him in it? The man who commits a crime
does not do so much mischief as the man who turns the criminal into a
hero. Frederic Graham did a weak, wicked, mean, and cowardly deed, not
being in his general nature weak, wicked, mean, or cowardly, and was
allowed to blunder on to a tolerable sort of something like happiness
in the end. No one has a right to complain, for all of us get a great
deal more and better than we deserve. We have no right to complain of
Providence, but we have a right to complain of the poet who comes up
and says not a word in reprobation of the meanness and cowardice, not a
word of the cruelty inflicted upon Jane, nor the wrong done to his own
soul; but veils the wickedness, excites our sympathy and pity, and in
fact makes Frederic out to be a sort of sublime and suffering martyr.
He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help
himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would have
breasted his sorrow manfully and alone. Instead of which, he shuffled
himself and his misery upon poor simple Jane, getting all the solace he
could from her, and leading her a wretched, almost hopeless life for
years. This is what we are to admire! This is the knight without
reproach! This is to be Faithful Forever! I suppose Coventry Patmore
thinks Frederic is to be commended because he did not break into
Honoria's house and run away with her. That is the only thing he could
have done worse than he did do, and that I have no doubt he would have
done if he could. I have no faith in the honor or the virtue of men or
women who will marry where they do not love. I think it is just as
sinful--and a thousand times as vile--to marry unlovingly, as to love
unlawfully.[*]
[*] Some one just here suggests that it was Jane who was faithful
forever, not Frederic. That indeed makes the title appropriate, but
does not relieve the atrocity of the plot.
There is this about mountains,--you cannot get away from them. Low
country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through
it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is
no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite
past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a
charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of
eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness,
shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,--we stand
before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud
us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower.
Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful,
evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft
outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is
nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a
rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has
that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing
changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds
in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can
be blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid positiveness. Even
in its cloudy, distant fairness, there is a concise, emphatic reality
altogether uncloudlike."
Seeing them from afar, lovely rather than terrible, we feel that though
between the mountain and its valley, with much friendly service and
continual intercourse, there can be no real communion, still the
mountain is not utterly lonely, but has yonder in the east its solace,
and in the north a companion, and over toward the west its coterie.
Solitary but to the lowly-living, in its own sphere there is immortal
companionship, and this vast hall of the heavens, and many a draught of
nectar borne by young Ganymede.
The Alpine House seems to be the natural caravansary for Grand Trunk
travellers, being accessible from the station without the intervention
of so much as an omnibus, and being also within easy reach of many
objects of interest. Here, therefore, we lay over awhile to strike out
across the mountains and into the valleys, and to gather health and
serenity for the weeks that were to come, with their urgent claims for
all of both that could be commanded.
Eastern Massachusetts is a very pretty place to live in, and the mutual
admiration society is universally agreed by its members to be the very
best society on this continent. Nevertheless, by too long and close
adherence to that quarter of the globe, one comes to forget how the
world was made, and, in fact, that it ever was made. We silently take
it for granted. It was always there. Smooth, smiling plains, gentle
hills, verdurous slopes, blue, calm streams, and softly wooded
banks,--a courteous, well-bred earth it is, and we forget that it has
not been so from the beginning. But here among the mountains, Genesis
finds exegesis. We stand amid the primeval convulsions of matter,--the
first fierce throes of life. Marks of the struggle still linger; nay,
the struggle itself is not soothed quite away. No more unexceptionable
surfaces, but yawns and fissures, chasms and precipices, deep gashes in
the hills, hills bursting up from the plains, rocks torn from their
granite beds and tossed hither and thither in some grand storm of Titan
wrath, rivers with no equal majesty, but narrow, deep, elfish, rising
and falling in wild caprice, playing mad pranks with their uncertain
shores, treacherous, reckless, obstreperous. Here we see the changes
actually going on. The earth is still a-making. More than one river,
scorning its channel, has, within the memory of man, hewn out for
itself another, and taken undisputed, if not undisturbed possession.
The Peabody River, which rolls modestly enough now, seeming, indeed, a
mere thread of brook dancing through a rocky bed by far too large for
it, will by and by, when the rains come, rise and roar and rush with
such impetuosity that these great water-worn stones, now bleaching
quietly in the sun, shall be wrenched up from their resting-places, and
whirled down the river with such fury and uproar that the noise of
their crashing and rolling shall break in upon your dreams at night.
Wild River, a little farther down, you may ford almost dry-shod, and in
four hours it shall reach such heights and depths as might upbear our
mightiest man-of-war. Many and many a gully, half choked with stones
and briers, lurks under the base of an overtopping hill, and shows
where a forgotten Undine lived and loved. The hills still bear the
scars of their wounds. No soft-springing greenness veils the tortuous
processes. Uncompromising and terrible, the marks of their awful
rending, the agony of their fiery birth, shall remain. Time, the
destroyer of man's works, is the perfecter of God's. These ravages are
not Time's; they are the doings of an early force, beneficent, but
dreadful. It is Time's to soothe and adorn.
We connect the idea of fixity with the mountains, but they seem to me
to be continually pirouetting with each other,--exchanging or entirely
losing their identity. You are in the Alpine Valley. Around you stand
Mount Hayes, so named in honor of a worthy housekeeper; the Imp,
sobriquet of a winsome and roguish little girl, who once made the house
gay; the Pilot range,--because they pilot the Androscoggin down to the
sea, says one to whom I never appeal in vain for facts or reasons;
Mount Madison, lifting his shining head beyond an opening niched for
him in the woods of a high hill-top by Mr. Hamilton Willis of Boston,
whom let all men thank. I thanked him in my heart every morning, noon,
and night, looking up from my seat at table to that distant peak, where
otherwise I should have seen only a monotonous forest line. Over
against the sunset is Mount Moriah, and Carter, and Surprise. You know
them well. You can call them all by name. But you have no sooner
turned a corner than--where are they? Gone,--all changed. Every line
is altered, every contour new. Spurs have become knobs. Peaks are
ridges; summits, terraces. Madison probably has disappeared, and some
Adams or Jefferson rises before you in unabashed grandeur. Carter and
the Imp have hopped around to another point of the compass. All the
lesser landmarks, as the old song says,
"First upon the heel-tap, then upon the toe,
Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so."
Your topography is entirely dislocated. You must begin your
acquaintance anew. Fresh lines and curves, new forms and faces and
chameleon tints, thrust you off from the secrets of the Storm-Kings.
While you fancy yourself to be battering down the citadel, you are but
knocking feebly at the out-works. You have caught a single phase, and
their name is legion. Infinite as light, infinite as form, infinite as
motion, so infinite are the mountains. Purple and intense against the
glowing sunset sky, the Pilot range curves its strong outlines, or
shimmers steely-blue in the noonday haze. Day unto day uttereth
speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge of their ever-vanishing
and ever-returning splendors. New every morning, fresh every evening,
we fancy each pageant fairer and finer than the last. Every summer
hour, a messenger from heaven, is charged with the waiting landscape,
and drapes it with its own garment of woven light, celestial broidery.
Sunshine crowns the crests, and stamps their kinship to the skies.
Shadows nestle in the dells, flit over the ridges, hide under the
overhanging cliffs, to be chased out in gleeful frolic by the slant
sunbeams of the mellow afternoon. Clouds and vapors and unseen hands
of heaven flood the hills with beauty. They have drunk in the warmth
and life of the sun, they quiver beneath his burning glance, they lie
steeped in color, gorgeous, tremulous, passionate, rosy red dropping
away into pale gold, emeralds dim and sullen where they ripple down
towards the darkness, dusky browns and broad reaches of blue-black
massiveness, till the silent starlight wraps the scene with blessing,
and the earth sitteth still and at rest.
On such an evening, never to be forgotten, we stood alone with the
night. Day had gone softly, evening came slowly. There was no speech
nor language, only hope and passion and purpose died gently out.
Individualities were not, and we stood at one with the universe, hand
in hand with the immortals, silent, listening. It was as if the
heavens should give up their secret, and smite us with the music of the
spheres. Suddenly, unheralded, up over the summit of Mount Moriah came
the full moan, a silver disc, a lucent, steady orb, globular and grand,
filling the valleys with light, touching all things into a hushed and
darkling splendor. To us, standing alone, far from sight of human face
or sound of human voice, it seemed the censer of God, swung out to
receive the incense of the world.
Multifold mists join hands with the light to play fantastic tricks upon
these mighty monarchs. The closing day is tender, bringing sacrifice
and oblation; but the day of flitting clouds and frequent showers riots
in changing joys. Every subordinate eminence that has arrogated to
itself the sublimity of the distant mountain, against whose rocky sides
it lay lost, is unmasked by the vapors that gather behind it and reveal
its low-lying outlines. Every little dimple of the hills has its
chalice of mountain wine. The mist stretches above the ridge, a long,
low, level causeway, solid as the mountains themselves, which buttress
its farther side, a via triumpha, meet highway for the returning
chariot of an emperor. It rears itself from the valleys, a dragon
rampant and with horrid jaws. It flings itself with smothering
caresses about the burly mountains, and stifles them in its close
embrace. It trails along the hills, floating in filmy, parting gauze,
scattering little flecks of pearl, fringing itself over the hollows,
and hustling against a rocky breastwork that bars its onward going. It
wreathes upward, curling around the peaks and veiling summits, whose
slopes shine white in the unclouded sun. It shuts down gray, dense,
sombre, with moody monotone. It opens roguishly one little loop-hole,
through which--cloud above, cloud below, cloud on this side and on
that--you see a sweet, violet-hued mountain-dome, lying against a
background of brilliant blue sky,--just for one heart-beat, and it
closes again, gray, sheeted, monotonous.
Leaving the valley, and driving along the Jefferson road, you have the
mountains under an entirely new aspect. Before, they stood, as it
were, endwise. Now you have them at broadside. Mile after mile you
pass under their solid ramparts, but far enough to receive the idea of
their height and breadth, their vast material greatness,--far enough to
let the broad green levels of the intervale slide between, with here
and there a graceful elm, towering and protective, and here and there a
brown farm-house. But man's works show puny and mean beside nature,
which seems spontaneous as a thought. Man's work is a toil; nature's
is a relief. Man labors to attain abundance; nature, to throw off
superabundance. The mountain-sides bristle with forests; man drags
himself from his valley, and slowly and painfully levels an inch or two
for his use; just a little way here and there a green field has crept
up into the forest. The mountain-chin has one or two shaven spots; but
for the greater part his beard is still unshorn. All along he sends
down his boon to men. Everywhere you hear the scurrying feet of little
brooks, tumbling pell-mell down the rocks in their frantic haste to
reach a goal;--often a pleasant cottage-door, to lighten the burden and
cool the brow of toil; often to pour through a hollow log by the
wayside,--a never-failing beneficence and joy to the wearied, trusty
horses. From the piazza of the Waumbeck House--a quiet, pleasant,
home-like little hotel in Jefferson, and the only one, so far as I
know, that has had the grace to take to itself one of the old Indian
names in which the region abounds, Waumbeck, Waumbeck-Methna, Mountains
of Snowy-Foreheads--a very panorama of magnificence unfolds itself.
The whole horizon is rimmed with mountain-ranges. The White Mountain
chain stands out bold and firm, sending greeting to his peers afar.
Franconia answers clear and bright from the south-west; and from beyond
the Connecticut the Green hills make response. Loth to leave, we turn
away from these grand out-lying bulwarks to front on our return
bulwarks as grand and massive, behind whose impregnable walls we seem
shut in from the world forever.
A little lyric in the epos may be found in a side-journey to Bethel,--a
village which no one ever heard of, at least I never did, till now; but
when we did hear, we heard so much and so well that we at once started
on a tour of exploration, and found--as Halicarnassus quotes the Queen
of Sheba--there was more of it than we expected. The ride down in the
train, if you are willing and able to stand on the rear platform of the
rear car, is of surpassing beauty. The mountains seem to rise and
approach in dumb, reluctant farewell. The river bends and insinuates,
spreading out to you all its islands of delight. Molten in its depths,
golden in its shallows, it meanders through its meadows, a joy forever.
Bethel sits on its banks, loveliest of rural villages, and gently
unfolds its beauties to your longing eyes. The Bethel House,--a large
old-fashioned country-house, with one of those broad, social
second-story piazzas, and a well bubbling up in the middle of the
dining-room--think of that, Master Brooke!--a hotel whose landlord
welcomes you with lemonade and roses (perhaps he wouldn't YOU!),--a
hotel terrible to evil-doers, but a praise to them that do well,
inasmuch as it is conducted on the millennial principle of quietly
frightening away disagreeable people with high rates, and fascinating
amiable people with reasonable ones, so that, of course, you have the
wheat without the chaff,--a hotel where people go to rest and enjoy,
and wear morning-dresses all day, and are fine only when they
choose--indeed, you can do that anywhere, if you only think so. The
idea that you must lug all your best clothes through the wilderness is
absurd. A good travelling-dress, admissible of bisection, a muslin
spencer for warm evenings, and a velvet bodice when you design to be
gorgeous, will take you through with all the honors of war. Besides,
there are always sure to be plenty of people in every drawing-room who
will be sumptuously attired, and you can feast your eyes luxuriously on
them, and gratefully feel that the work is so well done as to need no
co-operation of yours, and that you can be comfortable with an easy
conscience. Where was I? O, on the top, of Paradise Hill, I believe,
surveying Paradise, a little indistinct and quavering in the sheen of a
summer noon, but clear enough to reveal its Pison, its Gilton, its
Hiddekel, and Euphrates, compassing the whole land of Havilah; or
perhaps I was on Sparrowhawk, beholding Paradise from another point,
dotted with homes and church-spires, rich and fertile, fair still, with
compassing river and tranquil lake; or, more probable than either, I
was driving along the highland that skirts the golden meadows through
which the river purls, ruddy in the setting sun, and rejoicing in the
beauty amid which he lives and moves and has his being. Lovely Bethel,
fairest ornament of the sturdy mountain-land, tender and smiling as if
no storm had ever swept, no sin ever marred,--in Arcadia that no one
would ever leave but for the magic of the drive back to Gorham through
piny woods, under frowning mountains, circled with all the glories of
sky and river,--a drive so enticing, that, when you reach Gorham,
straight back again you will go to Bethel, and so forever oscillate,
unless some stronger magnet interpose.
A rainy day among the mountains is generally considered rather dismal,
but I find that I like it. Apart from the fact that you wish, or ought
to wish, to see Nature in all her aspects, it is a very beneficent
arrangement of Providence, that, when eyes and brain and heart are
weary with looking and receiving, an impenetrable barrier is
noiselessly let down, and you are forced to rest. Besides, there are
many things which it is not absolutely essential to see, but which,
nevertheless, are very interesting in the sight. You would not think
of turning away from a mountain or a waterfall to visit them, but when
you are forcibly shut out from both, you condescend to homelier sights.
For instance, I wonder how many frequenters of the Alpine house ever
saw or know that there is a dairy in its Plutonian regions. A rainy day
discovered it to us, and, with many an injunction touching possible
dust, we were bidden into those mysterious precincts. A carpet, laid
loose over the steps, forestalled every atom of defilement, and,
descending cautiously and fearfully through portals and outer courts,
we trod presently the adytum. It was a dark, cool, silent place. The
floors were white, spotless, and actually fragrant with cleanliness.
The sides of the room were lined with shelves, the shelves begemmed
with bright pans, and the bright pans filled with milk,--I don't know
how many pans there were, but I should think about a million,--and
there was a mound of pails piled up to be washed, and cosy little
colonies of butter, pleasant to eyes, nose, and mouth, and a curious
machine to work butter over, consisting of something like a table in
the shape of the letter V, the flat part a trough, with a wooden handle
to push back and forth, and the buttermilk running out at the apex of
the V. If the principle on which it is constructed is a secret, I
don't believe I have divulged it; but I do not aim to let you know
precisely what it is, only that there is such a thing. I hope now that
every one will not flock down cellar the moment he alights from the
Gorham train. I should be very sorry to divert the stream of travel
into Mr. Hitchcock's dairy, for I am sure any great influx of visitors
would sorely disconcert the good genius who presides there, and would
be an ill requital for her kindness to us; but it was so novel and
pleasant a sight that I am sure she will pardon me for speaking of it
just this once.
Another mild entertainment during an intermittent rain is a run of
about a mile up to the "hennery," which buds and blossoms with the
dearest little ducks of ducks, broad-billed, downy, toddling, tumbling
in and out of a trough of water, and getting continually lost on the
bluff outside; little chickens and turkeys, and great turkeys, not
pleasant to the eye, but good for food, and turkey-gobblers,
stiffest-mannered of all the feathered creation; and geese, sailing in
the creek majestic, or waddling on the grass dumpy; and two or three
wild geese, tolled down from the sky, and clipped away from it forever;
and guinea-hens, speckled and spheral; and, most magnificent of all, a
pea cock, who stands in a corner and unfolds the magnificence of his
tail. Watching his movements, I could not but reflect upon the
superior advantages which a peacock has over a woman. The gorgeousness
of his apparel is such that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed in the like; yet so admirable is the contrivance for its
management that no suspicion of mud or moisture stains its brilliancy.
A woman must have recourse to clumsy contrivances of india-rubber and
gutta-percha if her silken skirts shall not trail ignobly in the dust.
The peacock at will rears his train in a graceful curve, and defies
defilement.
Besides abundance of food and parade-ground, these happy fowls have a
very agreeable prospect. Their abrupt knoll commands a respectable
section of the Androscoggin Valley,--rich meadow-lands, the humanities
of church-spire and cottage, the low green sweep of the intervale
through which the river croons its quiet way under shadows of rock and
tree, answering softly to the hum of bee and song of bird,--answering
just as softly to the snort and shriek of its hot-breathed rival, the
railroad. Doubtless the railroad, swift, energetic, prompt, gives
itself many an air over the slow-going, calm-souled water-way, but let
Monsieur Chemin de Fer look to his laurels,--a thing of yesterday and
tomorrow,--a thing of iron and oil and accidents. I, the River,
descend from the everlasting mountains. I was born of the perpetual
hills. I fear no more the heat o' the sun, nor the furious winter's
rages; no obstacle daunts me. Time cannot terrify. My power shall
never faint, my foundations never shrink, my fountains never fail.
"Men may come, and men may go,
But I go on forever."
And the railroad, pertinacious, intrusive, aggressive, is, after all,
the dependent follower, the abject copyist of the river. Toss and
scorn as it may, the river is its leader and engineer. Fortunes and
ages almost would have been necessary to tunnel those mountains, if
indeed tunnelling had been possible, but the river winds at its own
sweet will. Without sound of hammer or axe, by force of its own
heaven-born instincts, it has levelled its lovely way unerring, and
wherever it goes, thither goes the railroad, to its own infinite gain.
Railroads are not generally considered picturesque, but from the
standpoint of that hennery, and from several other standpoints, I had
no fault to find. Unable to go straight on, as the manner of railroads
is, it bends to all the wayward little fancies of the river, piercing
the wild wood, curling around the base of the granite hills, now let
loose a space to shoot across the glade, joyful of the permission to
indulge its railroad instinct of straightness; and, amid so much
irregularity and headlong wilfulness, a straight line is really
refreshing. Up the sides of its embankment wild vines have twisted and
climbed, and wild-flowers have budded into bloom.
Berlin Falls is hardly a wet-day resource, but the day on which we saw
it changed its mind after we left the hotel, and from clouds and
promise of sunshine turned into clouds and certainty of rain. For all
that, the drive along the river, within sound of its roaring and
gurgling and rippling and laughing overflow of joy, with occasional
glimpses of it through the trees, with gray cloud-curtains constantly
dropping, then suddenly lifting, and gray sheets of rain fringing down
before us, and the thirsty, parched leaves, intoxicated with their much
mead of the mountains, slapping us saucily on the check, or in mad
revel flinging into our faces their goblets of honey-dew,--ah! it was a
carnival of tricksy delight, making the blood glow like wine. The
falls, which chanced to be indeed no falls, but shower-swollen into
rapids, are one of the most wonderful presentations of Nature's masonry
that I have ever seen. It is not the water, but the rock, that amazes.
The whole Androscoggin River gathers up its strength and plunges
through a gorge,--a gateway in the solid rock is regular, as upright,
as if man had brought in the whole force of his geometry and gunpowder
to the admeasurement and excavation,--plunges, conscious of
imprisonment and the insult to its slighted majesty,--plunges with
fierce protest and frenzy of rage, breaks against a grim, unyielding
rock to dash itself into a thousand whirling waves; then rushes on to
be again imprisoned between the pillars of another gorge, only less
regular, not less inexorable, than the first; then, leaping and
surging, it beats against its banks, and is hurled wrathfully back in
jets of spray and wreaths of foam; or, soothed into gentler mood by the
soft touch of mosses on the brown old rocks, it leaps lightly up their
dripping sides, and trickles back from the green, wet, overhanging
spray, and so, all passion sobbed away, it babbles down to its bed of
Lincoln green, where Robin Hood and Maid Marian wait under the oaken
boughs.
In the leaden, heavy air the scene was sombre,--tragic. In sunshine
and shadows it must have other moods, perhaps a different character; I
did not see the sunshine play upon it.
But the day of days you shall give to the mountain. The mountain,
Washington, king of all this Atlantic coast,--at least till but just
now, when some designing Warwick comes forward to press the claims of
an ignoble Carolinian upstart, with, of course, a due and formidable
array of feet and figures: but if they have such a mountain, where, I
should like to know, has he been all these years? A mountain is not a
thing that you can put away in your pocket, or hide under the eaves
till an accident reveals its whereabouts. Verily our misguided
brethren have much to do to make out a case; and, in the firm belief
that I am climbing up the highest point of land this side the Rocky
Mountains, I begin my journey.
Time was when the ascent of Mount Washington could be justly considered
a difficult and dangerous feat; but the Spirit of the Age who has many
worse things than this to answer for, has struck in and felled and
graded and curbed, till now one can ascend the mountain as safely as he
goes to market. I consider this road one of the greatest triumphs of
that heavily responsible spirit. Loquacious lovers of the "romantic"
lament the absence of danger and its excitements, and the road does
indeed lie open to that objection. He who in these latter days would
earn a reputation for enterprise--and I fancy the love of adventure to
be far less common than the love of being thought adventurous--must
have recourse to some such forlorn hope as going up the mountain on the
ice in midwinter, or coasting down on a hand-sled. But I have no
inclination in that direction. I am willing to encounter risks, if
there is no other way of attaining objects. But risks in and of
themselves are a nuisance. If there is no more excellent way, of
course you must clamber along steep, rugged stairways of bridle-paths,
where a single misstep will send you plunging upon a cruel and bloody
death; but so far as choice goes, one would much more wisely ride over
a civilized road, where he can have his whole mind for the mountain,
and not be continually hampered with fears and watchfulness for his own
personal safety. It is a great mistake to suppose that discomfort is
necessarily heroism. Besides, to have opened a carriage-way up the
mountain is to have brought the mountain with all its possessions down
to the cradle of the young and the crutch of the old,--almost to the
couch of the invalid. I saw recorded against one name in the books of
the Tip-top House the significant item, "aged eight months." Probably
the youngster was not directly much benefited by his excursion, but you
are to remember that perhaps his mother could not have come without
him, and therein lay the benefit. The day before our ascent, a lady
over seventy years old ascended without extreme fatigue or any injury.
Several days after, a lady with apparently but a few weeks of earth
before her, made the ascent to satisfy the longings of her heart, and
gaze upon the expanses of this, before the radiance of another world
should burst upon her view. If people insist upon encountering danger,
they can find a swift river and ford it, or pile up a heap of stones
and climb them, or volunteer to serve their country in the army:
meanwhile, let us rejoice that thousands who have been shut away from
the feast may now sit down to the table of the Lord.
This road, we were told, was begun about eight years ago, but by
disastrous circumstances its completion was delayed until within a year
or two. Looking at the country through which it lies, the only wonder
is that it ever reached completion. As it is, I believe its
proprietors do not consider it quite finished, and are continually
working upon its improvement. Good or bad, it seems to me to be much
the best road anywhere in the region. The pitches and holes that would
fain make coaching on the common roads so precarious are entirely left
out here. The ascent is continuous. Not a step but leads upward. The
rise was directed never to exceed one foot in six, and it does not; the
average is one foot in eight. Of course, to accomplish this there must
be a great deal of winding and turning. In one place you can look down
upon what seem to be three roads running nearly parallel along a ridge,
but what is really the one road twisting to its ascent. Some idea of
the skill and science required to engineer it may be gathered by
looking into the tangled wilderness and rocky roughness that lie still
each side the way. Through such a gnarled, knotted, interlaced jungle
of big trees and little trees, and all manner of tangled twining
undergrowths, lining the sides of precipices, or hanging with bare
roots over them, concealing dangers till the shuddering soul almost
plunges into them, the road-men carefully and painfully sought and
fought their way. Up on rocky heights it was comparatively easy, for,
as one very expressively phrased it, every stone which they pried up
left a hole and made a hole. The stone wrenched from above rolled
below, and go lowered the height and raised the depth, and constantly
tended to levelness. Besides, there were no huge tree-trunks to be
extracted from the unwilling jaws of the mountain by forest-dentists,
with much sweat and toil and pain of dentist if not of jaws. Since,
also, the rise of one foot in six was considered as great as was
compatible with the well-being and well-doing of horses, whenever the
way came upon a knob or a breastwork that refused to be brought down
within the orthodox dimensions, it must turn. If the knob would not
yield, the way must, and, in consequence, its lengthened bitterness is
long drawn out. A line that continually doubles on itself is naturally
longer than one which goes straight to the mark. Mount Washington is
little more than a mile high; the road that creeps up its surly sides
is eight miles long. Frost and freshet are constant foes; the one
heaves and cracks, and the other tears down through the cracks to
undermine and destroy. Twenty-seven new culverts, we were told, had
been made, within the space of a mile and a half, since last year; and
these culverts are no child's play, but durable works,--aqueducts lined
with stone and bridged with plank, large enough for a man to pass
through with a wheelbarrow, and laid diagonally across the road, so
that the torrents pouring down the gutter shall not have to turn a
right angle, which they would gladly evade doing, but a very obtuse
one, which they cannot in conscience refuse; and, as the road all the
way is built a little higher on the precipice side than on the mountain
side, the water naturally runs into the gutter on that side, and so is
easily beguiled into leaving the road, which it would delight to
destroy, and, roaring through the culvert, tumbles unwarily down the
precipice before it knows what it is about.
I have heard it said, that the man who originated this road has since
become insane. More likely he was insane at the time. Surely, no man
in his senses would ever have projected a scheme so wild and
chimerical, so evidently impossible of fulfilment. Projected it was,
however, not only in fancy, but in fact, to our great content; and so,
tamely but comfortably, an untiring cavalcade, we leave the peaceful
glen set at the mountain's base, and wind through the lovely, lively
woods, tremulous with sunshine and shadows, musical with the manifold
songs of its pregnant solitudes, out from the woods, up from the woods,
into the wild, cold, shrieking winds among the blenched rocks and the
pale ghosts of dead forests stiff and stark, up and up among the
caverns, and the gorges, and the dreadful chasms, piny ravines black
and bottomless, steeps bare and rocky leading down to awful depths; on
and on, fighting with maddened winds and the startled, wrathful
wraiths, onward and upward till we stand on the bleak and shivering,
the stony and soulless summit.
Desolation of desolations! Desolation of desolations! How terrible is
this place! The shining mountain that flashed back to the sun his
radiance is become a bald and frowning desert that appalls us with its
barrenness. The sweet and sylvan approach gave no sign of such a goal,
but the war between life and death was even then begun. The slant
sunlight glinted through the jungle and bathed us with its glory of
golden-green. The shining boles of the silvery gray birch shot up
straight, and the white birch unrolled its patches of dead pallor in
the sombre, untrodden depths. The spruces quivered like pure jellies
tipped with light, sunshine prisoned in every green crystal.
Myrtle-vines ran along the ground, the bunch-berry hung out its white
banner, and you scarcely saw the trees that lay faint and fallen in the
arms of their mates. The damp, soft earth nourished its numerous brood,
Terrae omni parentis alumnos, its own thirsty soul continually
refreshed from springs whose sparkle we could not see, though the
gurgle and ripple of their march sung out from so many hiding-places
that we seemed to be
"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams."
Whole settlements of the slender, stately brakes filled the openings,
and the mountain-ash drooped in graceful curves over our heads, but
gradually the fine tall trees dwindled into dwarfs, chilled to the
heart by the silent, pitiless cold. Others battled bravely with the
bowling winds, which have stripped them bare on one side, while they
seem to toss out their arms wildly on the other, imploring protection
and aid from the valley-dwellers below. Up and up, and you come
suddenly upon the "Silver Forest," a grove of dead white trees, naked
of leaf and fruit and bud, bare of color, dry of sap and juice and
life, retaining only their form,--cold set outline of their hale and
hearty vigor; a skeleton plantation, bleaching in the frosty sun, yet
mindful of its past existence, sturdy, and defiant of the woodman's
axe; a frostwork mimicry of nature, a phantom forest. On and on,
turning to overlook the path you have trodden, at every retrospect the
struggle between life and death becomes more and more palpable. The
Destroyer has hurled his winds, his frosts, his fires; and gray wastes,
broken wastes, black wastes, attest with what signal power. But life
follows closely, planting his seeds in the very footprints of death.
Where blankness and bleakness seem to reign, a tiny life springs in
mosses, rich with promise of better things. Long forked tongues of
green are lapping up the dreary wastes, and will presently overpower
them with its vivid tints. Even amid the blanched petrifaction of the
Silver Grove fresh growths are creeping, and the day is not far distant
that shall see those pale statues overtopped, submerged, lost in an
emerald sea. Even among the rocks, the strife rages. Some mysterious
principle inheres in the insensate rock, whose loss makes this
crumbling, discolored, inert debris. Up you go, up and up, and life
dies out. Chaos and ruin reign supreme. Headlong steeps yawn beside
your path, losing their depths in darkness. Great fragments of rock
cover all the ground, lie heaped, pile upon pile, jagged, gray, tilted
into a thousand sharp angles, refusing a foothold, or offering it
treacherously. Wild work has been here; and these gigantic wrecks bear
silent witness of the uproar. It seems but a pause, not a peace.
Agiocochook, Great Mountain of Spirits, rendezvous of departed souls,
clothed with the strength and fired with the passions of the gods,--in
what caverns under the cliffs do the wearied Titans rest? From what
dungeons of gloom emerging shall they renew their elemental strife?
What shall be the sign of their awaking to darken the earth with their
missiles and deafen the skies with their thunder? And what daring of
man is this to scorn his smiling valleys and adventure up into these
realms of storm? No Titan he, yet the truest Titan of all, for he
wrestled and overcame. No giant he, yet grander than the giants, since
without Pelion or Ossa he has scaled heaven. Through uncounted aeons
the mountain has been gathering its forces. Frost and snow and ice and
the willing winds have been its sworn retainers. Cold and famine and
death it flaunted in the face of the besieger. Man is of a day, and the
elements are but slippery allies. A spade and a compass are his meagre
weapons; yet man has conquered. The struggle was long, with many a
reconnaissance and partial triumph, but at length the victory is
complete. Man has placed his hand on the monarch's mane. He has
pierced leviathan with a hook. The secrets of the mountain are
uncovered. His fastnesses conceal no treasures that shall not be
spread out to the day. His bolts and bars of ice can no longer press
back the foot of the invader. Yon gray and slender ribbon, that floats
down his defiles, disappearing now over his ledges to reappear on some
lower range, and he lightly across the plateau,--that is his bridle of
submission, his badge of servitude. Obedient to that, he yields up his
hoarded wealth and pays tribute, a vassal to his lord. Men and women
and little children climb up his rugged sides, and the crown upon his
beetling brows is set in the circle of humanity.
In the first depression of abandonment one loses heart, and sees only
the abomination of desolation; but gradually the soul lifts itself from
the barren earth, and floats out upon the ocean, in which one stands
islanded on a gray rock, fixed in seas of sunshine.
Whether you shall have a fair day or a foul is as may be. At the
mountain's base they discreetly promise you nothing. It may be sunny
and sultry down there, while storms and floods have at it on the peak.
But mine was a day of days,--clear, alternating with cloudy. When you
had looked long enough to dazzle and weary your eyes, a cloud would
come and fold you about with opaqueness, and while you waited in the
cloud, lo here! lo there! it flashed apart and shimmered yonder a blue
sky, a brilliant landscape, and the distant level of the sea; or slowly
its whiteness cleaved and rolled away, revealing a glorified mountain,
a lake lying in the shadows, or the simple glen far down from which we
came. It was constant change and ever-new delight.
But this going up mountains is a bad thing for the clouds. All their
fleecy softness, all their pink and purple and pearly beauty, all the
mystery of their unattainableness, is weighed in the balance and found
to be fog, and by no means unapproachable. They will never impose upon
us again. Never more will they ride through the serene blue,
white-stoled cherubs of the sky. Henceforth there is very little sky
about them. Sail away, little cloud, little swell, little humbug. Make
believe you are away up in the curves of the sky. Not one person in
fifty will climb a mountain and find you out. But I have been there,
and you are nothing but fog, of the earth, earthy. And when I sat in
the cleft of a rock on the side of Mount Washington, every fibre dulled
through with your icy moisture, I could with a good will have sent a
sheriff to arrest you for obtaining love under false pretences. O you
innocent, child-like cloud heaving with warmth and passion as we saw,
but a gray little imp, cold at the heart, and malignant, and malignant,
as we felt.
Felt it only when we did feel it, after all; for no sooner did it roll
slowly away, and, ceasing to be a discomfort, turn into scenery, than
all its olden witchery came back. I have had no more than a glimpse of
the world from a mountain. The evening and the morning were the first
day; and, till time shall be no more, the evening and the morning will
be all that there is of the day, aesthetically considered. Yet at
noon,--the most unfascinating hour,--and in the early afternoon, though
you must needs fail of the twilight and its forerunners, there is an
intensity of brilliance and an immensity of breadth, that, it seems to
me, must be greater than if the view were broken up by light and shade.
You are blinded with a flood of radiance, disturbed, or rather
increased, by the flitting cloud-shadows. The mountains deepen in the
distance, burning red in the glare of the sun, bristling with pines,
mottled with the various tints of oak and maple relieving the soberer
evergreens purpling on the slopes through a spiritual hazy glow,
delicatest lavender, and pearl, where they lie scarcely pencilling
distant horizon. The clouds come sailing over, flinging their shadows
to the plains,--shadows wavering down the mountain-sides with an
indescribable sweet tremulousness, scudding over the lower summits,
pursued by some frolicsome gale which we do not see, or resting softly
in the dells, whose throbbing soothes itself to stillness in the
grateful shade. And still, midway between heaven and earth, snatched up
from the turmoil of the one into the unspeakable calm of the other, a
great peace and rest sink into our souls. All around lies the earth,
shining and silent as the sky, rippling in little swells of light,
breaking into luminous points, rising into shapely shafts, spreading in
limpid, molten silver, and all bathed, transmuted, glorified, with
ineffable light, and sacred with eternal silence.
A bubble of home-life adheres to this stern peak. Determination and
perseverance have built two stone cottages, rough and squat, where you
may, if you have no mercy, eat a fine dinner that has been wearily
dragged over eight miles of hillocky, rutty roads, and up eight miles
of mountain; and drink without any compunction clear, cold water that
the clouds have distilled without any trouble, and the rocks have
bottled up in excellent refrigerators and furnish at the shortest
notice and on the most reasonable terms, except in very dry weather.
Or if a drought drinks up the supply in the natural wells, there is the
Lake of the Clouds, humid and dark below, where you may see--I do not
know--the angels ascending and descending. The angels of the summit
are generally armed with a huge hoop, which supports their brace of
buckets as they step cautiously over the cragged rock fragments. If
you are ambitious to scale the very highest height, you can easily
mount the roof of the most frivolously named Tip-top House, and change
your horizon a fraction. If you are gregarious and crave society, you
can generally find it in multifarious developments. Hither come
artists with sketch-books and greedy eyes. Hither come photographers
with instruments, and photograph us all, men, mountains, and rocks.
Young ladies come, and find, after all their trouble, that "there is
nothing but scenery," and sit and read novels. Haud ignota loquor.
Young men come, alight from their carriages, enter the house, balance
themselves on two legs of their chairs, smoke a cigar, eat a dinner,
and record against their names, "Mount Washington is a humbug,"--which
is quite conclusive as concerning the man, if not concerning the
mountain. There is one man in whose fate I feel a lively curiosity.
As we were completing our descent, twisted, frowzy, blown to shreds,
burnt faces, parched lips, and stringy hair, a solitary horseman might
have been seen just commencing his ascent,--the nicest young man that
ever was,--daintily gloved, patently booted, oily curled, snowily
wristbanded, with a lovely cambric (prima facie) handkerchief bound
about his hyacinthine locks and polished hat. What I wish to know is,
how did he get along? How did his toilette stand the ascent? Did he,
a second Ulysses, tie up all opposing winds in that cambric
pocket-handkerchief? or did Auster and Eurus and Notus and Africus vex
his fastidious soul?
They say--I do not know who, but somebody--that Mount Washington in
past ages towered hundreds of feet above its present summit. Constant
wear and tear of frost and heat have brought it down, and its crumbling
rock testifies to the still progress of decay. The mountain will
therefore one day flat out, and if we live long enough, Halicarnassus
remarks, we may yet see the Tip-top and Summit Houses slowly let down
and standing on a rolling prairie. Those, therefore, who prefer
mountain to meadow should take warning and make their pilgrimage
betimes.
It is likely that you will be the least in the world tired and a good
deal sunburnt when you reach the Glen House; and, in defiance of all
the physiologies, you will eat a hearty supper and go right to bed, and
it won't hurt you in the least. Nothing ever does among the mountains.
The first you will know, you open your eyes and it is morning, and
there is Mount Washington coming right in at your window, bearing down
upon you with his seamed and shadowy massiveness, and you will forget
bow rough and rocky he was yesterday, and will pay homage once more to
his dignity of imperial purple and his solemn royalty.
The moment you are well awake, you find you are twice as good as new,
and after breakfast, if you are sagacious, no one belonging to you will
have any peace until you are striking out into the woods again,--the
green, murmurous woods, tenanted by innumerable hosts of butterflies in
their sunny outskirts, light-winged Psyches hovering in the warm, rich
air, stained and spotted and splashed with every bright hue of yellow
and scarlet and russet, set off against brilliant blacks and whites;
dark, cool woods carpeted with mosses thick, soft, voluptuous with the
silent tribute of ages, and in their luxurious depths your willing feet
are cushioned,--more blessed than feet of Persian princess crushing her
woven lilies and roses; the tender, sweet-scented woods lighted with
bright wood-sorrel, and fragrant with dews and damps;--to the Garnet
pool, perhaps, first, where the water has rounded out a basin in the
rock, and with incessant whirls and eddies has hollowed numerous little
sockets, smooth and regular, till you could fancy yourself looking upon
the remains of a petrified, sprawling, and half-submerged monster.
Where the water is still, it is beautifully colored and shadowed with
the surrounding verdancy and flickering light and motion. If you have
courage and a firm foothold, if you will not slip on wet rock, and do
not mind you hands and knees in climbing up a dry one, if you can coil
yourself around a tree that juts out over a path you wish to follow,
you can reach points where the action of the water, violent and
riotous, can be seen in all its reckless force. But, "Don't hold on by
the trees," says Halicarnassus; "you will get your gloves pitchy."
This to me, when I was in imminent danger of pitching myself
incontinently over the rocks, and down into the whirlpools!
Glen Ellis Falls we found in a random saunter,--a wild, white
water-leap, lithe, intent, determined, rousing you far off by the
incessant roar of its battle-flood, only to burst upon you as
aggressive, as unexpected and momentary, as if no bugle-peal had
heralded its onset. Leaning against a tree that juts out over the
precipice, clinging by its roots to the earth behind, and affording you
only a problematical support, you look down upon a green, translucent
pool, lying below rocks thickset with hardy shrubs and trees, up to the
narrow fall that hurls itself down the cleft which it has grooved,
concentrated and alert at first, then wavering out with little tremors
into the scant sunshine, and meeting the waters beneath to rebound with
many a spring of surge and spray. A strange freak of the water-nymphs
it is that has fashioned this wild gulf and gorge, softened it with the
waving of verdure, and inspirited it with the energy of eager waters.
Unsated we turn in again, thridding the resinous woods to track the shy
Naiads hiding in their coverts. Over the brown spines of the pines,
soft and perfumed, we loiter, following leisurely the faint warble of
waters, till we come to the boiling rapids, where the stream comes
hurrying down, and with sudden pique flies apart, on one side going to
form the Ellis, on the other the Peabody River, and where in five
minutes a stalwart arm could drain the one and double the other.
Indeed, the existence of these two rivers seems to be a question of
balance and coincidence and hairbreadth escapes. Our driver pointed
out to us a tree whose root divides their currents. We pause but a
moment on the crazy little bridge, and then climb along to the foot of
the "Silver Cascade," farther and higher still, till we call see the
little brook murmuring on its mountain way in the cliff above, and look
over against it, and down upon it, as it streams through the rock,
leaps adown the height, widening and thinning, spreading out over the
face of the declivity, transmuting it into crystal, and veiling it with
foam, leaping over in a hundred little arcs, lightly bounding to its
basin below, then sweeping finely around the base of the projecting
rock, and going on its way singing song of triumph and content. A
gentle and beautiful Undine, the worshipping boughs bend to receive its
benediction. Venturesome mosses make perpetual little incursions into
its lapping tide, and divert numberless little streams to trickle
around their darkness, and leap up again in silver jets, clapping their
hands for joy.
"Now thanks to Heaven that of its grace
Hath led me to this lonely place;
Joy have I had, and going hence
I bear away my recompense."
All good and holy thoughts come to these solitudes. Here selfishness
dies away, and purity and magnanimity expand, the essence and germ of
life. Sitting here in these cool recesses, screened from the sun,
moist and musical with the waters, crusts of worldliness and vanity
cleave off from the soul. The din dies away, and, with ears attuned to
the harmonies of nature, we are soothed to summer quiet. The passion
and truth of life flame up into serene but steadfast glow. Every
attainment becomes possible. Inflated ambitions shrivel, and we reach
after the Infinite. Weak desire is welded into noble purpose.
Patience teaches her perfect work, and vindicates her divinity. The
unchangeable rocks that face the unstable waters typify to us our
struggle and our victory. Day by day the conflict goes on. Day by day
the fixed battlements recede and decay before their volatile opponent.
Imperceptibly weakness becomes strength, and persistence channels its
way. God's work is accomplished slowly, but it is accomplished. Time
is not to Him who commands eternity; and man, earth-born, earth-bound,
is bosomed in eternity.
One and another has a preference, choosing rather this than that, and
claiming the palm for a third; but with you there is no comparison.
Each is perfect in his kind. Each bodies his own character and
breathes his own expression.
O to be here through long, long summer days, drenched with coolness and
shadow and solitude, cool, cool, cool to the innermost drop of my hot
heart's-blood!
Never!
Why do I linger among the mountains? You have seen them all. Nay,
verily, I could believe that eyes had never looked upon them before.
They were new created for me this summer-day. I plucked the flower of
their promise. I touched the vigor of their immortal youth.
But mountains must be read in the original, not in translation. Only
their own rugged language, speaking directly to eye and heart, can
fully interpret their meaning. What have adjectives, in their wildest
outburst, to do with rocks upheaved, furrows ploughed, features
chiselled, thousands and thousands of years back in the conjectured
past? What is a pen-scratch to a ravine?
For speed and ease cars are, of course, unsurpassed; but for romance,
observation, interest, there is nothing like the old-fashioned coach.
Cars are city; coaches are country. Cars are the luxurious life of
well-born and long-purses people; coaches are the stirring, eventful
career of people who have their own way to make in the world. Cars
shoot on independent, thrusting off your sympathy with a snort; coaches
admit you to all the little humanities, every jolt harmonizes and
adjusts you, till you become a locomotive world, tunefully rolling on
in your orbit, independent of the larger world beneath. This is
coaching in general. Coaching among the White Mountains is a career by
itself,--I mean, of course, if you take it on the outside. How life
may look from the inside I am unable to say, having steadfastly avoided
that stand-point. When we set out it rained, and I had a battle to
fight. First, it was attempted to bestow me inside, to which, if I had
been a bale of goods, susceptible of injury by water, I might have
assented. But for a living person, with an internal furnace well fed
with fuel, in constant operation, to pack himself in a box on account
of a shower, is absurd. What if it did rain? I desired to see how
things looked in the rain. Besides, it was not incessant; there were
continual liftings of cloud and vapor, glimpses of clear sky, and a
constant changing of tints, from flashing, dewy splendor, through the
softness of shining mists, to the glooms of gray clouds, and the
blinding, uncompromising rain,--so that I would have ridden in a
cistern rather than have failed to see it. Well, when the outside was
seen to be a fixed fact, then I must sit in the middle of the
coachman's seat. Why? That by boot, umbrellas, and a man on each
side, I might be protected in flank, and rear, and van. I said audibly,
that I would rather be set quick i' the earth, and bowled to death with
turnips. If my object had been protection, I should have gone inside.
This was worse than inside, for it was inside contracted. If I looked
in front, there was an umbrella with rare glimpses of a steaming horse
on each side, the exhilarating view of a great coat behind, a pair of
boots. I might as well have been buried alive. No, the upper seat was
the only one for a civilized and enlightened being to occupy. There
you could be free and look about, and not be crowded; and I am happy to
be able to say, that I am not so unused to water as to be afraid of a
little more or less of it. So I ceased to argue, planted myself on the
upper seat, grasped tho railing, and smiled on the angry remonstrants
below,--smiled, but STUCK! "Let her go," said the driver in a savage,
whispered growl,--not to me, but a little bird told me,--"let her go.
Can't never do nothin' with women. They never know what's good for
'em. When she's well wet, then she'll want to be dried." True, O
driver! and thrice that morning you stopped to change horses, and
thrice with knightly grace you helped me down from the coach-top,
gentle-handed and smooth of brow and tongue, as if no storm had ever
lowered on that brow or muttered on that tongue, and thrice I went into
the village inns and brooded over the hospitable stoves, and dried my
dripping garments; and when once your voice rang through the hostelrie,
while yet I was enveloped in clouds of steam, did not the good young
woman seize her sizzling flat-iron from the stove, and iron me out on
her big table, so that I went not only dry and comfortable, but smooth,
uncreased, and respectable, forth into the outer world again?