It was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise from
Bartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extends
between mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often as
level as a church-aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we had
been loitering towards the heart of the White Mountains,—those old
crystal hills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our distant
wanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after height had
risen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang below
the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, those
avalanches of earth, stones, and trees, which descend into the hollows,
leaving vestiges of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation
of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side, and a
group of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco,
right towards the centre of that group, as if to climb above the clouds
in its passage to the farther region.
In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
Northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart
through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrous
path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was
travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he
passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across
his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it
asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of
hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain’s
inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side.
This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted
to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of
those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not
to the conception, of Omnipotence.
We had now reached a narrow passage, which showed almost the appearance
of having been cut by human strength and artifice in the solid rock.
There was a wall of granite on each side, high and precipitous,
especially on our right, and so smooth that a few evergreens could
hardly find foothold enough to grow there. This is the entrance, or, in
the direction we were going, the extremity, of the romantic defile of
the Notch. Before emerging from it, the rattling of wheels approached
behind us, and a stage-coach rumbled out of the mountain, with seats on
top and trunks behind, and a smart driver, in a drab great-coat,
touching the wheel-horses with the whip-stock and reigning in the
leaders. To my mind there was a sort of poetry in such an incident,
hardly inferior to what would have accompanied the painted array of an
Indian war-party gliding forth from the same wild chasm. All the
passengers, except a very fat lady on the back seat, had alighted. One
was a mineralogist, a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black,
bearing a heavy hammer, with which he did great damage to the
precipices, and put the fragments in his pocket. Another was a
well-dressed young man, who carried an operaglass set in gold, and
seemed to be making a quotation from some of Byron’s rhapsodies on
mountain scenery. There was also a trader, returning from Portland to
the upper part of Vermont; and a fair young girl, with a very faint
bloom like one of those pale and delicate flowers which sometimes occur
among alpine cliffs.
They disappeared, and we followed them, passing through a deep pine
forest, which for some miles allowed us to see nothing but its own
dismal shade. Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,
surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out the sunshine
long before it left the external world. It was here that we obtained
our first view, except at a distance, of the principal group of
mountains. They are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a
proper mood, yet, by their breadth of base and the long ridges which
support them, give the idea of immense bulk rather than of towering
height. Mount Washington, indeed, looked near to Heaven: he was white
with snow a mile downward, and had caught the only cloud that was
sailing through the atmosphere to veil his head. Let us forget the
other names of American statesmen that have been stamped upon these
hills, but still call the loftiest WASHINGTON. Mountains are Earth’s
undecaying monuments. They must stand while she endures, and never
should be consecrated to the mere great men of their own age and
country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is universal, and
whom all time will render illustrious.
The air, not often sultry in this elevated region, nearly two thousand
feet above the sea, was now sharp and cold, like that of a clear
November evening in the lowlands. By morning, probably, there would be
a frost, if not a snowfall, on the grass and rye, and an icy surface
over the standing water. I was glad to perceive a prospect of
comfortable quarters in a house which we were approaching, and of
pleasant company in the guests who were assembled at the door.