"No scenes have given me more lasting pleasure. The mountains, it is said, are not lofty enough for sublimity. But as the light and cloud play on them, and they arise around you in dark, or silver, or purple masses, the effect is very magical-under certain lights, even perfectly sublime. Scenes more spiritual Switzerland itself could hardly produce. But all comparisons are futile. We grow to love a country, as we grow to love a person, because we have there exercised our faculty of loving. Nowhere to me has nature been more kindly beautiful. And who has not noticed how all the pleasing accessories of a fertile and homely landscape gain infinitely by their union with the mountain ranges? The streams run conscious of the purple hills; every tree and flower has something more than its own beauty, when it grows in the shadow, or in the light, of the glorious mountains. Wherever they rear their mystic summits to the clouds, there is an indescribable commingling of heaven and of earth. mountain is the religion of the landscape." The THORNDALE. THE ANDROSCOGGIN VALLEY. THE railroad from Portland to Montreal meets the Androscoggin River at Bethel in Maine, twenty miles distant from Gorham. Bethel itself is the North Conway of the eastern slope of the mountains, and would well reward a visit of a few days. It has no single patch of meadow that is so fascinating as the broad emerald floor under the Mote Mountain, which has excited in artists such joy and such despair. But its river-scenery is much richer than that of the Saco; and it has so many pleasant strips of meadow, like the "Middle Intervale," relieved by the broad winding Androscoggin in front, and by ample hills in the rear, brightly colored to the summit with fertile farms, that, for drives, it is a question if North Conway would not be obliged to yield the palm. Before many years it is to be hoped that there will be a larger overflow from the regular track, into the more lonely aisles and the side-chapels of the grand cathedral district of New Hampshire. Then the wonder will be that Bethel was not from the first more celebrated. As we write about it, we have a picture in mind which Paradise Hill showed to us in a showery noon, on our first visit to the village. The height is fitly named. We can see now the wide array of gentle hills swelling so variously that the verdure of the forests, or the mottled bounty of the harvests, drooped from them in almost every curve of grace. Some of these hills were partially lighted through thin veils of cloud; some were draped with the tender gray of a shower, which now and then would yield to flushes of moist and golden sunshine; not far off rose a taller summit in slaty shadow; and between, on the line of the river, the different greens of the intervale would gleam in the scattered streams of light that forced their way, here and there, through the heavy and trailing curtains of the dogday sky. In the morning or evening light that horizon must inclose countless pictures which only need selection, and not improvement, for the canvas. The ride in the cars from Bethel to Gorham is very charming. If the railroad approached no nearer to Gorham than this point, a stageride along the same route could hardly be rivalled in New Hampshire. What a delightful avenue to the great range it would be! The brilliant meadows, proud of their arching elms; the full broad Androscoggin, whose charming islands on a still day rise from it like emeralds from liquid silver; the grand, Scotch-looking hills that guard it; the firm lines of the White Mountain ridge that shoot, now and then, across the north, when the road makes a sudden turn; and at last, when we leave Shelburne, the splendid symmetry that bursts upon us when the whole mass of Madison is seen throned over the valley, itself overtopped by the ragged pinnacle of Adams;-it is, indeed, hard to say that any approach to the mountains could be finer than from Conway through Bartlett up the Saco Valley,—but we honestly think that, if the distance between Bethel and Gorham were traversed by stage, travellers would confess that it must take the first rank, among all the paths to Mount Washington. In the introductory chapter we called attention to the fact, that around the village of Gorham some of the most impressive landscapes to be found in New England, are combined from the Androscoggin River, its meadows, the lower hills that inclose it, and one or two of the great White Mountains proper that overlook the valley. This is the only region where we can see one of the four highest mountains of the chain standing alone; and so there is no point from which such an impression of height is obtained as on the banks of the Androscoggin within two or three miles of Gorham, or from some of the hills around the village. In order to call attention to one of the most striking of these landscapes in which Mounts Madison and Adams are the dominant figures, we will quote a portion of a letter by the writer of these pages to a friend. As it was sent fresh from an enjoyment of the scene, on the evening of a hot summer day, just after the long railroad ride from Boston, it may have less feebleness than a copy of the scene from memory. "Shall I write you a Miserere over the journey to Gorham to-day, or an Exultemus at the arrival? It has been a dreadful avenue to the temple-the long hours of heat and dust, of roar and cinders; but it is all past, and, while it made the pleasure of the day's end |