beauty, the blazing fleece which moves and melts in the upper blue, and the fantastic photographs which they leave upon the hills below, often draping a mountain like Madison or Kiarsarge in a leopard-skin of spotted light and gloom!

They rear their sunny copes

Like heavenly Alps, with cities on their slopes,
Built amid glaciers-bristling fierce with towers,
Turrets, and battlements of warlike powers-
Jagged with priestly pinnacles and spires-

And crowned with domes, that glitter in the fires
Of the slant sun, like smithied silver bright;-
The capitals of Cloudland.

Or perhaps the south wind fills the air with dusty gold, and makes each segment of a district that was prosaic enough a week before, seem a sweet fraction of Italy. Possibly, it tries its hand at mists. Then what mischief and frolic! It brindles the mountain sides with them. Or it stretches them across their length, as though it meant to weave all the vapors which the air could supply, into a narrow and interminable web of fog. Now, again, it twines the mists around their necks; then it smothers the peaks with them, and soon tears them apart to let the grim heads look out; and before long, in more serious mood, it bids them stream up and off, like incense from mighty altars. Sometimes, for half a day it will revel in a rollicking temper, and will wind a ruff around the neck of solemn Chocorua; or it will adorn the crown of Kiarsarge with a trailing veil of vapory Mechlin or it will compel the bald head of Adams, much to the improvement of his phrenology, to sport a towering peruke, with a queue a few miles long streaming upon the breeze. And then there will be sunsets and dawns, each of which would amply repay for the journey.

The difficulty is, that in rushing so fast as many of us do through the mountains, the mountains do not have time to come to us. These old settlers are tardy in forming intimate acquaintanceships. With them "confidence is a plant of slow growth." Their externals they give to the eye in a moment, on a clear day; but their character,

their aspects of superior majesty, their fleeting loveliness of hue,—all that makes them a refreshment, a force, a joy of the rest of our year, they show only to the calmer eye, to the man who waits a day or two in order to unthink his city habits, domesticate himself as their guest, and bide their time. If we could learn, or be content, to use a week at some central point of any valley, instead of hurrying through all of them,-to spend the same money at one spot that is usually spread over the lengthened journey, to take the proper times for driving quietly to the best positions, we should see vastly more, as any of the intelligent visitors in North Conway will assure us. We should understand not only topography, but scenery. We should not carry away jumbled recollections like dissolving views, but clear pictures in memory. The mountains would come to us, which, it is said, they refused to do for the author of the Koran.

THE PEMIGEWASSET VALLEY.

The Pemigewasset is the main source of the Merrimack. It opens the natural avenue to the Franconia range, which is easily reached from Boston in a day. By the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad, taking trains which connect with that road either from the station of the Boston and Maine or the Boston and Lowell railways, the traveller reaches Plymouth, N. H., which is about one hundred and twenty miles from Boston, a little after noon. Having dined in Plymouth, he takes the stage for either of the two excellent public-houses in the Franconia Notch-the Flume House, which is twenty-five miles distant, or the Profile House, which is five miles further. Either of these houses will be reached before sunset, and the tourist will have the benefit of the afternoon light, while he

The winding Pemigewasset, overhung

tracks

By beechen shadows, whitening down its rocks,

Or lazily gliding through its intervals,

From waving rye-fields sending up the gleam
Of sunlit waters.

The whole ride, if the day is pleasant, will afford various and perpetual delight. The valley, for most of the way, is broader than that of the Saco above North Conway, and gives a larger number of distinct pictures on the upward drive. The hills do not huddle around the road; the distances are more artistic; and the lights and shades have better chance to weave their more subtle witchery upon the distant mountains that bar the vision,-upon the whale back of Moosehillock, and the crags and spires that face each other in the Franconia Notch.

The picture of the Pemigewasset, seen from a bend of the road in the little village of Campton, will be one of the prominent pleasures of the afternoon. How briskly it cuts its way in sweeping curves through the luxuriant fields! and with what pride it is watched for miles of its wanderings by the Welch mountain completely filling the background, from which its tide seems to be pouring, and upon whose shoulders, perhaps, the clouds are busily dropping fantastic shawls of shadow! In this part of its course, the river is scarcely less free than it was in the days which Whittier alludes to, in his noble apostrophe to the Merrimack :

Oh, child of that white-crested mountain whose springs
Gush forth in the shade of the cliff eagle's wings,
Down whose slopes to the lowlands thy wild waters shine,
Leaping gray walls of rock, flashing through the dwarf pine.

From that cloud-curtained cradle so cold and so lone,
From the arms of that wintry-locked mother of stone,
By hills hung with forests, through vales wide and free,
Thy mountain-born brightness glanced down to the sea!

No bridge arched thy waters save that where the trees
Stretched their long arms above thee, and kissed in the breeze;
No sound save the lapse of the waves on thy shores,
The plunging of otters, the light dip of oars.

But the most striking views which the ride from Plymouth to the

Flume House affords, are to be found after passing the "Grafton House" in Thornton. The distant Notch does not show as yet the savageness of its teeth; but the arrangement of the principal Franconia mountains in half-sexagon-so that we get a strong impression

of their mass, and yet see their separate steely edges, gleaming with different lights, running down to the valley-is one of the rare pictures in New Hampshire. What a noble combination,-those keen contours of the Haystack pyramids, and the knotted muscles of Mount Lafayette, beyond! He hides his rough head, as far as possible, behind his neighbor, but pushes out that limb which looks like an arm from a statue of a struggling Hercules that some Titan Angelo might have hewn. A visitor with an eye for these strongest

lines of expression in the mountains has finely said: "As in Flaxman's drawings of Homeric heroes and horses, one fine hair-stroke reveals the whole beauty and force of that regal fancy, so these outlines of the hills, by the Divine Hand, wonderfully express the immense vitality curbed, but not lost, which shot them up from central abysses." The downward roll of that spur of Lafayette strikingly resembles the convolutions of the famous Trinity Cape, on the Saguenay.

The Pemigewasset valley was early settled by Scotch emigrants. Possibly they were attracted by some resemblance to the Highland scenery of their old home. No mountain of Perthshire or Inverness is so high as Lafayette; and they could not have seen, in the Trossachs, mountain-walls more sheer and threatening than "The Notch" would have showed them, if they could have clambered into it before the present road was made. In fact, a visitor familiar with Scott's poetry, driving up to "The Notch" and into it for the first time, about sunset, would recall this passage from "The Lady of the Lake," and feel that it might have been written for Franconia :

The western waves of ebbing day
Roll'd o'er the glen their level way;
Each purple peak, each flinty spire,
Was bathed in floods of living fire.

But not a setting beam could glow
Within the dark ravines below,

Where twined the path, in shadow hid,
Round many a rocky pyramid,
Shooting abruptly from the dell
Its thunder-splinter'd pinnacle;
Round many an insulated mass,
The native bulwarks of the pass,
Huge as the tower which builders vain
Presumptuous piled on Shinar's plain.
The rocky summit, split and rent,
Form'd turret, dome, or battlement,

Or seem'd fantastically set

With cupola or minaret,

Wild crests as pagod ever decked,

Or mosque of eastern architect.