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when he laid his hand upon the mane of the sea,--for he stood in fancy on the Alban Mount, some miles away from the ocean, when he stretched out his arm to touch it thus. Here we see the northeastern wall of the White Mountain chain declining sharply to the valley. From Randolph Hill we look down to the lowest course of its masonry, and up to the two noblest spires of rock which the ridge supports. How lonely and desolate it looks, aloft there! And yet

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those pinnacles, that are scarcely fanned
by a breath of summer, and that feel
such storms as the valleys never know
and could not bear, is it not whole-

some to look at them and think what they undergo for the good of
New England? Must we not summon Emerson's lines, that stand
at the portal of his stirring pages on Heroism, to express the feeling
which these granite types of Puritan pith and sturdiness awaken,
when we look up to their storm-scarred brows?

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves

Sugar spends to fatten slaves

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Rose and vine leaf deck buffoons;
Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons,
Drooping oft, in wreaths of dread,
Lightning-knotted round his head;
The hero is not fed on sweets,
Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,

And head-winds right for royal sails.

It seems, however, to be true that no mountain is a hero to its valley, although the proverb may be false in regard to men. Many, no doubt, will sympathize with the antipathy of the English writer who says: "If they look like Paradise for three months in the summer, they are a veritable Inferno for the other nine; and I should like to condemn my mountain-worshipping friends to pass a whole year under the shadow of Snowden, with that great black head of his shutting out the sunlight, staring down in their garden, overlooking all they do, in the most impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at them with rain, hail, snow, and bitter, freezing blasts, even in the hottest sunshine. A mountain? He is a great, stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in his head, whose highest ambition is to give you one also. As for his beauty, no natural object has so little of its own. He owes it to the earthquakes that reared. him up, to the rains and storms which have furrowed him, to every gleam and cloud which passes over him. In himself, he is a mere helpless stone-heap."

We once asked a good-natured old farmer who lived on Randolph Hill, if he did not find it inspiring to dwell on a spot where two such forms as Madison and Adams towered so grandly before his eyes. "Blast 'em," said he, "I wish they was flat; I don't look at 'em for weeks at a time." "But," said we, "the great summits must look peculiarly grand in winter." "Guess not," he said, "it's too 'tarnal cold. You come and see the same clouds whirling round them peaks three weeks at a time, and you'd wish the hills was moved off and dumped somewhere else." The good old fellow's flesh shuddered like jarred jelly, while he told us of the hardships of winter there, as though he began to feel already the biting nor'westers which the

next January would unleash upon the hills. Moreover he couldn't understand what so many people from Gorham, especially of the "female sect," that often, he said, "covered them rocks six and eight at a time," came to Randolph Hill to see.

Every symphony should have a sportive movement. But it must not close with a Scherzo. As we turn back from Randolph Hill, and descending, lose sight of the base which the summits of Adams and Madison crown, let us hear Wordsworth interpret what such hills should be in a long acquaintance :—

I could not, ever and anon, forbear

To glance an upward look on two huge peaks,
That from some other vale peered into this.
"Those lusty twins," exclaimed our host, "if here
It were your lot to dwell, would soon become

Your prized companions.-Many are the notes
Which, in his tuneful course, the wind draws forth
From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores;
And well these lofty brethren bear their part
In the wild concert-chiefly when the storm
Rides high; then all the upper air they fill
With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow,
Like smoke, along the level of the blast,
In mighty current; theirs, too, is the song
Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails;
And, in the grim and breathless hour of noon,
Methinks that I have heard them echo back
The thunder's greeting. Nor have nature's laws
Left them ungifted with a power to yield
Music of finer tone; a harmony,

So do I call it, though it be the hand

Of silence, though there be no voice;-the clouds,
The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns,
Motions of moonlight, all come thither-touch,
And have an answer-thither come, and shape
A language not unwelcome to sick hearts
And idle spirits:-there the sun himself,
At the calm close of summer's longest day,
Rests his substantial orb;-between those heights
And on the top of either pinnacle,

More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault,
Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud.
Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man
Than the mute agents stirring there:-alone
Here do I sit and watch."

We have already said that the noble scenery for which Gorham should be visited is not to be seen from the hotel. For this reason many tourists, not attracted strongly by the views from the platform where the cars land them, hurry away in the stage to the Glen, and lose the enjoyment of some of the richest landscapes which New England holds, that would be shown to them by short drives, or even by walks that may be taken without fatigue. There is no hint at the public-house of any such picture as we have just attempted to describe. There is no suggestion of any ridge, or bulwark, or crag, of Mount Madison and Mount Adams. Yet a level walk of a mile, on the road along the Androscoggin, brings out both the mountains from base to crown. If they were visible in such majesty from the piazza of the hotel, we feel sure, that, spacious as it is, it would not be large enough to accommodate the travellers that would crowd to it. No portion of Mount Washington is in sight from its grounds; yet a walk of half a mile below, or into a pasture near, with an easy slope, is repaid by one of the most impressive views of its dome and ravines. that can be gained.

It is by a low and uninteresting hill, which rises directly in front of the hotel, that the mountains of the Washington chain are thus concealed. Back of the house, across the Androscoggin, swells the broad-based Mount Hayes. Numerous picturesque spurs, broken by jutting ledges, whose base the river washes in its downward sweep, run out from it to the intervale, and fascinate the artists by the "silver colonnades" of birch which they uprear, and by the contrasts of light and verdure on their higher turrets of rock.

The sky along the northwest is cut by the grand outline of the Pilot Mountain wall. This ridge is remarkable for the splendid shadows from clouds that wander over it in the forenoons, when the northwest wind rolls heavy masses of the cumuli towards Mount Washington. It has one other distinction, too, which should be known by all visitors of the valley. The deep chasm which is plainly seen, in a clear morning, from the piazza of the Alpine House, cut about midway of the long battlement, and from which the cloud

shadows that dip into it often spread each way upon the mountain, like the wings of a tremendous condor, is the only hiding-place we have ever found in the region, where the winter is not dislodged by the fogs and sun of August. The hollows under the rocks in the upper portions of the ravine are ice-houses that never fail. On the 8th day of September, 1858, the most oppressive day of the season in the Androscoggin Valley, the writer explored this cleft, and found its shadowed side so cold that it was dangerous to rest there even for a few moments,-so chilly was the breath from the ice-blocks between the immense boulders, which the winter hides there in the hope, perhaps, of defying the sun yet with a glacier in New Hampshire.

Southward from the hotel, Mount Moriah and Mount Carter, separated from each other by another eminence called "The Imp," tower pretty sharply, and form one of the walls of the Glen. The portions of this range that rise from the Peabody Valley, flare out towards their tops somewhat like a half tunnel, as from a common centre below. When the mists or fog-wreaths ascend from it in the morning, we see what an immense caldron is rimmed there by walls of matted wilderness; and in the evening, when a storm breaks away, and mists pour up like incense from those deeps to the level of the thin summits of the chain, one can hardly see a more gorgeous show of color than is given in the green shadows, held by the deep-cut stairways of Mount Carter, the strong and brilliant purple that floods its crest, and the amber and rose with which the mists are dyed as they float upward to thin away and melt into the blue.

Mount Moriah itself should be seen from the bend of the Androscoggin River, a little more than a mile north of the hotel. Here its charming outline is seen to the best advantage. Its crest is as high over the valley as Lafayette rises over the Profile House; and, with the exception perhaps of the Mote Mountain in North Conway, the long lines of its declivity towards the east, flow more softly than any others we can recall. They wave from the summit to the valley in

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