superb Mote Mountain, that bounds the scene before us, its wooded wall upreared as for the walk of some angel sentinel that shall keep holy watch and ward all night over the lovely mountain-girded scene. A little later, one may almost fancy he perceives the sheen of the

colossal armor gleaming up there in the starlight! Now the sun sends mingled light and lengthened shadows over the picturesque labors of the haymakers, in the broad, green, beautiful meadows that spread, a mile wide, waving with grass and grain and patches of

glistening corn, clear to the mountain's feet, to the hieroglyphic rocky faces of the curious ledges, that form its outposts in front, and to the winding Saco River, whose course is marked with gracefully overhanging elms and oaks and maples, that also stud the plain in scattered groups, and shade the brooks that ramble, musically gurgling, to the river. A lovelier plain was never spread before a poet's feet, to woo the willing thoughts abroad. A scene of plenty, purity, and peace. On our right, in the north, loom the White Mountains, blue and misty and yet boldly outlined. There is Mount Washington, rearing his broad Jove-like throne amid his great brothers and supporters; these, with innumerable lesser mountains, (each Olympian enough when clouds cap and conceal the grander ones behind them,) gaze solemnly and serenely down our broad valley, and look new meanings in the ceaseless changes of the air and light.

"In the forenoon, when every leaf and blade of grass was stirring before the strong, purifying west wind, and when all this motion strangely contrasted with the clear still blue sky above, and with the exquisitely white fleecy clouds that rested on the summits of Mount Washington and of his lower neighbors, we strolled away over the meadows alone. It was a magnificent scene; the tall ripe grass, the corn and oats and bearded barley, bending and tossing in the wind about us, and running in incessant waves, which it was an inexhaustible delight to watch, and try to seize the outline of the law of such infinitely varied and yet unitary motion. It was Nature's best type of the Fugue in music; the same perpetual pursuit and tendency of many to one end, yet never ending.

"Our friend's house, which is just back from the road by which the crowded stage-loads of scenery seekers pass through the Notch of the White Mountains, stands on a raised plateau that rims the meadow foresaid; and here now, on the door-step sit we in the cool of the evening, filling sight and soul with all this beauty. The sun has gone down, and the new moon has lifted her pure silvery crescent from behind the Mote. We gaze upon it through the leafy

arches of three tall, stately elms, that stand on guard upon the roadside just before the house. The world without makes music to the world within; the outward scene is like a glowing reflex of the soul's ideal and harmonious moods. Nature and conscious life are one. It seems just the spot where one-with fitting company-might realize a perfectly artistic life. Poetry might bathe her visionary eyes in ever new and quickening light, and choose her language out of the words which God's finger has traced in innumerable forms and types of beauty and of meaning all around her. Philosophy might meditate the problems of life and eternity, with every report of the five outward senses loyally conspiring, not disturbing. Art might illustrate and complete all with a human meaning, and realize the pictures and the statues and the noble edifices which it sees hinted in the landscape. For one, we would contribute far more readily, extravagant as it might be, to some colossal marble statue or architectural pile, that should cast its shadow yonder from the ridge of the Mote Mountain, than to that civilized absurdity of the Washington monument scheme at the Capitol. Music, of the rarest, highest, most artistic, would sound as fitting and as truly home-like here, as do the native birds and waterfalls. And worship finds a solemn, heavensuggesting altar in each mountain height.

"What music-lover has not often longed that he might hear the fine strains of the masters in the summer, in the open air, amid nature's free and grand surroundings, and not be doomed to know such chiefly in the ungrateful artificial limits of the concert room, with gas light and unsympathetic crowds. Here, by a rare luck, we taste this pleasure, this doubly perfect harmony. A piano, almost a rarer wonder here to simple villagers than the first locomotive, has but this day arrived, nor are there wanting cunning fingers to woo forth its music; and as our eyes range the meadows and the mountains, delicate strains of Chopin, notturnes, preludes, and mazourkas, steal from the house and float like the voice of our own soul's selectest, inmost thoughts and feelings over the whole scene. And hark! now sister voices blend the angel trio from Elijah,' Lift thine eyes! Were

we not already lifting them, and to the mountains? And melodies of Robert Franz, (Nun die Schatten dunkeln, &c.,) as fresh and genuine and full of soul, and free from hacknied commonplace, as if they had been born among these mountains, sing to us and sing for us, and bridge over that awkward chasm of conscious dumbness, which sometimes so painfully separates us from the life and soul of that outward beauty which seems to challenge us for something corresponding on our part. The fairest landscape dies and turns cold before us, and looks ghost-like and unreal, often, as the moon pales before the sun, for the want of something more than nature, such as friends, or Art, or intellectual study, or true worship, or some creative action or expression on our own part, which shall meet Nature half way and fulfil the purpose of her invitation. Such is Music to our idle group (and yet how richly occupied) beneath the moon and stars here this sweet evening."

After some hours kindred in artistic privilege with those which our friend has thus described, it was our fortune, in returning under a dark sky to the hotel, to see a remarkable exhibition over the North Conway meadows, produced by a very humble cause. The hot evening had brought out the fire-flies by the acre over the intervale; and looking down and off from the banks, forty feet in the dusk, while the bottom was invisible, it was a grander spectacle than we can describe, to see two or three miles of darkness sparkling with winged stars. It required but little fancy to catch the outline of mimic constellations— momentary Dippers, ephemeral Pleiades, evanescent parodies in the insect phosphorus of colossal Orion with his club of suns. And let us not think that the boundless and persistent splendor of the skies is insulted by this comparison. For let us remember that, to the inseeing eye, the Infinite Art is shown no less in the veining of insect wings, and that vital energy which shed those twinkles of a second over the evening fields, than in the whirl of the monstrous balls that sprinkle light through the deeps of a firmament, and which, in the measure of His large purposes, may be only flickers of a moment on a larger tract of gloom. Is it not written, "All of them shall wax

old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed"?

"There's nothing great

Nor small," has said a poet of our day,

(Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve
And not be thrown out by the matin's bell)

And truly, I reiterate, . . . nothing's small!

No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee,

But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim:
And, glancing on my own thin, veinéd wrist,—
In such a little tremor of the blood

The whole strong clamor of a vehement soul

Doth utter itself distinct. Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.

If now, turning in another direction, we seek to explain the difference in charm between North Conway and other villages of the mountains, we must bear in mind that there is the same difference between scenes in nature, that there is between words when put together at random and words arranged in sentences. Ordinarily, hills and streams, trees and fields, convey by their arrangement no definite impression, and hold attention by no intellectual charm. They simply supply the scattered vocabulary of line and flash, tint and form, by means of which the artist rewrites his symmetrical thought. Truth, for the purposes and order of science, is furnished by one tree as well as another; by a stream, whether it leap in musical cascade or flow calmly to the sea; by the mountain, regardless of the slope of its wall, or the shape of its crest. But for purposes of art and artistic joy, the disposition and proportion of materials are all important; for thus only is land lifted into landscape. It is pleasant to find in any scene one or two instances of combination-rock with stream, meadow and hill, dip and cone-that will satisfy the eye, and offer a sentence or a rhyme of the omnipresent Artist. It is delightful when we find a paragraph or a long passage, that obeys the grammar of beauty, and prints a rounded conception of the Creator. Then the day is too short for the ever-renewing joy of vision. The distinc