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and landscape of North Conway. But think of driving across those meadows in a breezy afternoon and taking a poem fresh from the lips of Tennyson! No, we do not pretend that such has ever been our fortune; but we do say that in a wagon, as we drove across the intervale, under the shadow of the maple groves, and twice through the hurrying river which nearly buried the wheels with its merry flood, we caught the first echo that had fallen on our ears, this side the sea, from the richest strain of the Laureate's silver bugle. It was when a lady chanted in joyous soprano to a delighted party,

The splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going;
O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying;

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Is not that an association to glorify forever in memory the soft and drooping clouds that overhung the Saco, the lights and shadows that skimmed, widening, melting, ever-renewing their fruitless but joyous chase over the billowy grass, and the sombre patience of Mount Washington, himself flecked with mottled light and gloom? Of course the echoes from Echo Lake, which lies in front of "The Cathedral," sounded that afternoon more mellow, floating back from "Elfland," rather than from the face of a granite wall. And yet one visit to the lake by moonlight lies even more softly and winningly

in memory. The savage twin-cliffs and the wooded link that unites them, like the bond of the Siamese pair, reflected in that little sheet of water, seemed a picture rather than a reality-a dream lying yet before the imagination of the Creator, rather than the embodiment of it in the rough elements of nature. An evening spent there when the full rising moon silvers "The Ledges," and burnishes the bosom of the lake, and sheds its beams among its dark pine fringes, to slip slowly down the stately columns of the larger trees, will long be remembered as a sweet midsummer night's dream.

But we must now pass with only a word of greeting "Diana's Baths," which also belong to the resources of the visit to "The Cathedral,”—the valley views offered from the ride on the Dundee road, the excursion to Jackson with the cascade pictures on a branch of the Ellis River-the wild glen to be found in the drive to Sligo the triple cascades of Wildwood Brook, not long since discovered the glorious excursion to Fryeburg, with the views gained of Jockey Cap, and the Saco intervales of that village, and Lovell's Pond which has the distinction of being more deeply dyed with tradition than any other sheet of water in New England. Gould's Pond and the ride to Chocorua Lake we have spoken of in a former chapter.

The "Artist's Brook" in the village itself is the only feature of the scenery that we can delay with now. Its true celebration is to be found in the artists' studios, or in the galleries, for which it has furnished exquisite tangles of foliage and light; rough boulders around whose clinging mosses the water slips with a flash that can be painted but with a voice that cannot be entrapped; curves through diminutive glens, half in shadow and sprinkled on the other side with light through fluttering birch leaves, or an over-hanging beech with marbled stem, such as Kensett loves to paint; and more open passages, where the water brawls, and the thinner trees of the sides show the bulk of distant Washington. Sitting down on the meadow where the brook loiters over its sandy bed, and sometimes stops to cool itself in the green shadow of an elm before it moves on to join the

Saco near at hand, does it not sing essentially the same song to us that the brook did which Tennyson has thus translated?

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Till last by Philip's farm I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling.

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel,

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel.

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance

Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

A sonnet of Wordsworth's also, written evidently in praise of some English stream, that in quality and character is cousin to this gem of North Conway, ought to be quoted here.

Brook! whose society the Poet seeks,
Intent his wasted spirits to renew;

And whom the curious Painter doth pursue
Through rocky passes, among flowery creeks,
And tracks thee dancing down thy waterbreaks;
If wish were mine some type of thee to view,
Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do
Like Grecian Artists, give thee human cheeks,
Channels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be,-
Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs;
It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,
And hath bestowed on thee a better good;
Unwearied joy, and life without its cares.

We have already said that the dreaminess which pervades the air and hangs around the walls of North Conway, rests upon the slopes of Kiarsarge and veils the roughness and barrenness of its acclivities. Seen through the haze of a genial afternoon it seems as though it would be pastime to mount its cone, carpeted then to the eye with a plushy depth and indistinctness of mellow and cross-lighted air. One cannot see then how he could require more than half an hour to gain its summit from the base, although it stands twenty-seven hundred feet above the valley. Many persons have been tempted by this illusion to ascend on foot, and have thus been brought to a permanent conviction that a mountain is something very different in genus from a hill.

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