fainter contrasts of purple and green are left again in the evening shadow. In thinking of that view as it was given, towards sunset, while seated under the shadow of the dark firs that hem the western edge of the Profile Lake, the music of the good old abbot's evening meditation, in Longfellow's "Golden Legend," floats into our memry :

Slowly, slowly up the wall

Steals the sunshine, steals the shade;
Evening damps begin to fall,
Evening shadows are display'd.
Round me, o'er me, everywhere,
All the sky is grand with clouds,
And athwart the evening air

Wheel the swallows home in crowds.
Shafts of sunshine from the west

Paint the dusky windows red;
Darker shadows, deeper rest,
Underneath and overhead.
Darker, darker, and more wan
In my breast the shadows fall,
Upward steals the life of man
As the sunshine from the wall.
From the wall into the sky,
From the roof along the spire;
Ah, the souls of those that die
Are but sunbeams lifted higher.

This cliff, and the whole wall with which it is connected, shows its height more impressively in some of the misty dogdays, when fogs play their tricks along its breastworks. Sometimes they break away above, and let the pinnacles of rock be seen disconnected from the base. Then we can hardly believe that Lafayette himself has not moved a little nearer, and pushed aside the curtains to look down at the Profile House. Sometimes they tear themselves into horizontal strips, through whose lines of gray the green and purple of the trees and rocks give peculiar pleasure to the eye. Sometimes they thicken below and break above, to show a dash or a long line of delicate amber light upon the edge of the wall. At last the whole texture gets mysteriously loosened, and the broad curtain begins at once to rise and melt. The sunshine pours unobstructed over the Notch, and

only here and there a shred of the morning fog is left to loiter up wards. Watch it, and think of Bryant's poem:

Earth's children cleave to Earth-her frail

Decaying children dread decay.

Yon wreath of mist that leaves the vale,
And lessens in the morning ray:
Look how, by mountain rivulet,

It lingers as it upward creeps,

And clings to fern and copsewood set
Along the green and dewy steeps;
Clings to the fragrant kalmia, clings
To precipices fringed with grass,
Dark maples where the wood-thrush sings,
And bowers of fragrant sassafras.

Yet all in vain-it passes still

From hold to hold, it cannot stay,

And in the very beams that fill

The world with glory, wastes away,

Till, parting from the mountain's brow,

It vanishes from human eye,

And that which sprung of earth is now
A portion of the glorious sky.

The most attractive advertisement of the Franconia Notch to the travelling public is the rumor of the "Great Stone Face," that hangs upon one of its highest cliffs. If its inclosing walls were less grand, and its water gems less lovely, travellers would be still, perhaps, as strongly attracted to the spot, that they might see a mountain which breaks into human expression,-a piece of sculpture older than the Sphynx, an intimation of the human countenance, which is the crown of all beauty, that was pushed out from the coarse strata of New England thousands of years before Adam.

The marvel of this countenance, outlined so distinctly against the sky at an elevation of nearly fifteen hundred feet above the road, is greatly increased by the fact that it is composed of three masses of rock which are not in perpendicular line with each other. On the brow of the mountain itself, standing on the visor of the helmet that covers the face, or directly underneath it on the shore of the little lake, there is no intimation of any human features in the lawless

rocks. Remove but a few rods either way from the guide-board on the road, where you are advised to look up, and the charm is dissolved. Mrs. Browning has connected a law of historical and social insight with a passage and a fancy, that many of our readers will be

is revealed to them :

Every age,

Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We'll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man:

The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guess'd as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They'd have, in fact, to travel ten miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the say,

And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,-hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down

To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus
With times we live in,-evermore too great
To be apprehended near.

One of Mr. Hawthorne's admirable "Twice-told Tales" has woven a charming legend and moral about this mighty Profile; and in his description of the face the writer tells us : "It seemed as if an enor mous giant, or Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other." We must reduce the scale of the charming story-teller's description. The whole profile is about eighty feet in length; and of the three separate masses of rock which are combined in its composition, one forms the forehead, another the nose and upper lip, and the third the chin. The best time to see the Profile is about four in the afternoon of a summer day. Then, standing by the little lake at the base and looking up, one fulfils the appeal of our great transcendental poet in a literal sense in looking at the jutting rocks, and,

through their granite seeming

Sees the smile of reason beamning.

The expression is really noble, with a suggestion partly of fatigue and melancholy. He seems to be waiting for some visitor or message. On the front of the cliff there is a pretty plain picture of a man with a pack on his back, who seems to be endeavoring to go up the valley. Perhaps it is the arrival of this arrested messenger that the old stone visage has been expecting for ages. The upper portion of the mouth looks a little weak, as though the front teeth had decayed, and the granite lip had consequently fallen in. Those who can see it with a thundercloud behind, and the slaty scud driving thin across it, will carry away the grandest impression which it ever makes on the be holder's mind. But when, after an August shower, late in the after

noon, the mists that rise from the forest below congregate around it, and, smitten with sunshine, break as they drift against its nervous outline, and hiding the mass of the mountain which it overhangs, isolate it with a thin halo, the countenance, awful but benignant, is "as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills, and enrobing himself in a cloud vesture of gold and purple."

The whole mountain from which the Profile starts is one of the noblest specimens of majestic rock that can be seen in New Hamp shire. One may tire of the craggy countenance sooner than of the sublime front and vigorous slopes of Mount Cannon itself—especially as it is seen, with its great patches of tawny color, in driving up from the lower part of the Notch to the Profile House. Yet the interest of the mountain to visitors has been so concentrated in the Profile, that very few have studied and enjoyed the nobler grandeur on which that countenance is only a fantastic freak. And many, doubtless, have looked up with awe to the Great Stone Face, with a feeling that a grander expression of the Infinite power and art is suggested in it than in any mortal countenance. "Is not this a place," we have heard it said, "to feel the insignificance of man?" Yes, before God, perhaps, but not before matter. The rude volcanic force that puffed the molten rocks into bubbles, has lifted nothing so marvellous in structure as a human skeleton. The earthquakes and the frosts that have shaken and gnawed the granite of Mount Cannon into the rough semblance of an intelligent physiognomy, are not to be compared for wonder to the slow action of the chemistries that groove, chasten, and tint the bones and tissues of a human head into correspondence with the soul that animates it, as it grows in wisdom and moral beauty. The life that veins and girdles the noblest mountain on the earth, is shallow to the play of vital energies within a human frame.

No mountain can
Measure with a perfect man.

The round globe itself is only the background upon which the human face is chiselled. Each one of us wears more of the Infinite art,-is