him, is the most northerly summit, are the most striking features of the borders of the lake. An American artist who had lived many years in Italy, on a recent visit to this country, went to Winnipiseogee with the writer of these pages. He was greatly impressed and charmed with the outlines of this range, which is seen at once from the boat as she leaves Weir's landing. He had not supposed that any water view in New England was bordered with such a mountain frame. And before the steamer had shot out from the bay upon the bosom of the lake, he had transferred to his sketch-book its long combination of domes and heavy scrolls and solid walls, all leading to a pyramid that supports a peak desolate and sheer.

The most striking picture, perhaps, to be seen on the lake, is a view which is given of the Sandwich range in going from Weir's to Centre Harbor, as the steamer shoots across a little bay, after passing Bear Island, about four miles from the latter village. The whole chain is seen several miles away, as you look up the bay, between Red Hill on the left, and the Ossipee mountains on the right. If there is no wind, and if there are shadows enough from clouds to spot the range, the beauty will seem weird and unsubstantial,-as though it might fade away the next minute. The weight seems to be taken out of the mountains. We might almost say

They are but sailing foam-bells

Along Thought's causing stream,
And take their shape and sun-color
From him that sends the dream.

Only they do not sail, they repose. The quiet of the water and the sleep of the hills seem to have the quality of still ecstasy. It is only inland water that can suggest and inspire such rest. The sea itself, though it can be clear, is never calm, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep and to dream.

But there is one view which, though far less lovely, is more exciting to one who has been a frequent visitor of the mountains. It is where Mount Washington is visible from a portion of the steamer's

track, for some fifteen or twenty minutes. Passing by the westerly declivity of the Ossipee ridge, looking across a low slope of the Sandwich range and far back of them, a dazzling white spot perhaps if it is very early in the summer-gleams on the northern horizon. Gradually it mounts and mounts, and then runs down again as suddenly, making us wonder, possibly, what it can be. A minute or two more, and the unmistakable majesty of Washington is revealed. There he rises, forty miles away, towering from a plateau built for his throne, dim green in the distance, except the dome that is crowned with winter, and the strange figures that are scrawled around his waist in snow.

Why should all the nearer splendors affect an old visitor of the hills less than that spectacle? Why should Whiteface, which seems, at a careless glance, much higher by its nearness, or the haughty Chocorua, move less joyous emotions than that tinted etching on the northern sky? Why will not a cloud thrice as lofty and distinct in its outline, suggest such power and waken such enthusiasm? Is there a physical cause for it? Is it that the volcanic power expended in upheaving one of the supreme summits,

when with inward fires and pain

It rose a bubble from the plain,

is permanently funded there, and is suggested to the mind whenever we see even the outlines in the distant air,-thus making it represent more vitality and force than any pile of thunderous vapor can? Or is it explained by the law of association,—because we know, in looking at those faint forms, that their crests have no rivals in our northern latitude this side the Rocky Mountains,-that the pencilled shadows of their foreground are the deepest gorges which landslides have channelled and torrents have worn in New England,-and that from their crown a wider area is measured by the eye, than can be seen this side the Mississippi?

How admirably and tenderly Mr. Ruskin has touched this point in a passage, which our readers will thank us that we quote for them,

from the third volume of "The Modern Painters: "Examine the nature of your own emotion (if you feel it) at the sight of an Alp, and you find all the brightness of that emotion hanging, like dew on gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and imperfect knowledge. First, you have a vague idea of its size, coupled with wonder at the work of the great Builder of its walls and foundations; then an apprehension of its eternity, a pathetic sense of its perpetualness, and your own transientness, as of the grass upon its sides; then, and in this very sadness, a sense of strange companionship with past generations in seeing what they saw. They did not see the clouds that are floating over your head; nor the cottage wall on the other side of the field; nor the road by which you are travelling. But they saw that. The wall of granite in the heavens was the same to them as to you. They have ceased to look upon it; you will soon cease to look also, and the granite wall will be for others. Then, mingled with these more solemn imaginations, come the understandings of the gifts and glories of the Alps, the fancying forth of all the fountains that well from its rocky walls, and strong rivers that are born out of its ice, and of all the pleasant valleys that wind between its cliffs, and all the châlets that gleam among its clouds, and happy farmsteads couched upon its pastures; while together with the thoughts of these rise strange sympathies with all the unknown of human life and happiness, and death, signified by that narrow white flame of the everlasting snow, seen so far in the morning sky.

These images, and far more than these, lie at the root of the emotion which you feel at the sight of the Alp. You may not trace them in your heart, for there is a great deal more in your heart, of evil and good, than you ever can trace; but they stir you and quicken you for all that. Assuredly, so far as you feel more at beholding the snowy mountain than any other object of the same sweet silvery gray, these are the kind of images which cause you to do so; and, observe, these are nothing more than a greater apprehension of the facts of the thing. We call the power Imagination,' because it imagines or conceives; but it is only noble imagination if it imagines or conceives the truth."

And from the hint of these last words, let us have a little talk with our readers concerning enthusiasm in seeing such scenery as the Lake furnishes in charming days. Sometimes, people go into New Hampshire with such apathetic eyes, that they have no relish for richness of landscape, or for mountain grandeur. There is no smack in their seeing. And there are others, who, if they are not disappointed in the outlines, the heights, and the colors that are shown to them, still think it vulgar to show enthusiasm. Any glee, or clapping of the hands, or hot superlative, is almost as heinous to them as a violation of the moral law. Just as some women think health vulgar, and cultivate languor, there are persons who repress real feeling, and assume the blasé mood as a matter of gentility or manners.

The foundation of this feeling it is not easy to understand. A visit to Lake Winnipiseogee, a journey to the mountains, if we have been hemmed within city walls, or chained to a prosaic landscape, most of the year, ought to be made a vacation season, a jubilee for the eye, which was formed for free range of the splendors which the Creator has scattered over space. The eye is the chief physical sign of the royalty of man on the globe. Our hands stretch but a few feet from our bodies; hearing reaches comparatively but a little way; but the sense of sight relates us consciously to the unbounded. The beast has no perception of the breadth and depth of space. His eye is a definite faculty, bound to bodily service, like a finger, a wing, or a claw. But think of the reaches of distance through which the eye of man is able to soar; think of the delicate tintings it can distinguish and enjoy; think of the sublime breadth and roofing it supplies to our apparently insignificant existence,-reaching as it does to the Pleiades and the Milky Way and the cloud-light in the belt of Orion!

To learn to see is one of the chief objects of education and life. First as infants we learn to push the world off from ourselves, and to disentangle ourselves as personalities from a mesh of sensations. Then we gain power to detect and measure distance; then to perceive forms and colors; and at last to relate objects quickly and

properly to each other by a sweep of the eye. And this process is crowned by the poetic perception of general beauty, in which our humanity flowers out, and by which we obtain possession of the world. "The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title." The general beauty of the world is a perpetual revelation, and if we are impervious to its appeal and charm, a large district of our nature is curtained off from the Creator, "and wisdom at one entrance quite shut out."

As soon, therefore, as we become educated to see, and just in proportion to our skill in seeing, we get joy. The surprise to the senses in first looking upon a noble landscape, ought to show itself in childlike animation. The truly cultivated perception is chiefly conditioned by the recovery of the innocence of the eye. Forms and colors look as fresh to the truly trained intellect, as they do to the uncritical sense of the little child that chases its golden-winged butterfly without any competence to measure the horizon, or any feeling that it is pursuing its fluttering enticement unroofed in immensity. Mr. Ruskin tells us, in his work on the Elements of Drawing, that every highly accomplished artist has reduced himself, in dealing with the colors of a landscape, as nearly as possible to the condition of infantine sight. So that perpetual surprise and enthusiasm are signs of healthy and tutored taste.

And let us not forget that the charm which the person discerns who feels rapture amid such scenes as Winnipiseogee offers, is not illusive. It is founded on fact. The man who sees the most beauty in that landscape, deals with the facts as demonstrably as if he were engaged all day in dipping buckets of water from its treasury, or shovelling sand and felling birches on its shores. Agassiz finds marvel enough for a month's study, and for unbounded admiration, in a