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And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone;
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the Lady's voice,-old Skiddaw blew
His speaking-trumpet;-back out of the clouds
Of Glaramara southward came the voice;

And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.

Thus far, we have been held by the attractions in the upper part of Franconia Notch that immediately surround the Profile House. We must now follow the Pemigewasset a few miles below, to the southern opening of the pass, where the Flume House commands the widening valley. Those who would thoroughly enjoy a forenoon, and taste with eye and ear the freshness of the forest, the glancing light on a mountain stream, the occasional rare beauty of the mosses on its banks, the colors at the bottom of its cool, still pools, the overarching grace of its trees, or the busy babble of its broken and sparkling tide, should walk from one hotel to the other, down the river which runs parallel with the road, but which is for the most part concealed from it by the forest. A real lover of Nature, who has time at command, will no more consent to lose the pleasures which these rambles give in unveiling the coy charms of Nature's wildness, for the sake of the greater ease and speed of the stage, than he would think of taking his "dinner concentrated in a pill."

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher tells us: "I have always wished that there might be a rock-spring upon my place. I could wish to have, back of the house some two hundred yards, a steep and treecovered height of broad, cold, and mossy rocks-rocks that have seen trouble, and been upheaved by deep inward forces, and are lying in any way of noble confusion, full of clefts, and dark and mysterious passages, without echoes in them, upholstered with pendulous vines and soft with deep moss. Upon all this silent tumult of wild and shattered rocks, struck through with stillness and rest, the thick forest should shed down a perpetual twilight. The only glow that ever chased away its solemn shadows should be the red rose-light ɔf sunsets, shot beneath the branches and through the trunks, lighting

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up the gray rocks with strange golden glory." Mr. Beecher refers to the light which Longfellow has described in Hiawatha : —

Slowly o'er the simmering landscape
Fell the evening's dusk and coolness,
And the long and level sunbeams
Shot their spears into the forest,
Breaking through its shields of shadow,
Rushed into each secret ambush,

Searched each thicket, dingle, hollow.

"What light is so impressive as this last light of the day streaming into a forest so dark that even insects leave it silent? Yes, another light is as strange-that rose-light of the afternoon, which shines down a hill-side of vivid green grass, taking its hues, and strikes through the transparent leaves into the forest below, and spreads itself along the ground in a tender color for which we have no name, as if green were just melting into rose color, and orange color were just seizing them both.

"But to return to the spring. In such a rock forest as I have spoken of, far up in one of its silent aisles, a spring should burst forth, making haste from the seams of the rock, as if just touched with the prophet's rod-cold, clear, copious, and musical from its birth. All the way to the outer edge of the forest it should find its own channels, and live its own life, unshaped by human hands. But before the sun touched it, we should have a rock reservoir, into which it should gather its congregation of drops now about to go forth into useful life."

The Basin, about a mile from the Flume House, to which the walk down the Pemigewasset leads us, is just what the poetic preacher would desire to have transported to his grounds. The granite bowl, sixty feet in circumference, is filled with water ten feet deep, that is pellucid as air. The rocky shelf, twenty feet above, has been grooved by a cascade that perpetually pours over; and into the depths of cool shadow below, golden flakes of light sink down like falling leaves. If it did not lie so near the dusty road, or if a landscape gardener could be commissioned to arrange the surroundings of

it, it would be as rare a gem as the Franconia cabinet of curiosities

could show.

There is a silent pool, whose glass

Reflects the lines of earth and sky;
The hues of heaven along it pass,
And all the verdant forestry

And in that shining downward view,
Each cloud, and leaf, and little flower,
Grows 'mid a watery sphere anew,
And doubly lives the summer hour.

Beside the brink, a lovely maid

Against a furrowed stem is leaning,
To watch the painted light and shade
That give the mirror form and meaning.

Her shape and cheek, her eyes and hair,
Have caught the splendor floating round;
She in herself embodies there

All life that fills sky, lake, and ground.

And while her looks the crystal meets,
Her own fair image seems to rise;
And, glass-like, too, her heart repeats

The world that there in vision lies.

The best way to enjoy the beauty of the Basin, is to ascend to the highest of the cascades that slide along a mile of the slope of the mountain at the west. Then follow down by their pathways, as they make the rocks now white with foam, now glassy with smooth, thin, transparent sheets, till they mingle their water with the Pemigewasset at the foot, and pouring their common treasury around the groove worn into the rocky roof, fall with musical splash into the shadowed reservoir beneath. Wordsworth has versified a tradition connected with such a pool among the Cumberland hills. We can enjoy the poetry of it by the Basin, if we are not allowed to associate its pathos with the air shadowed by that mossy granite, and moist with spray that broke not long before in rain upon the mountain-tops.

A love-lorn Maid, at some far-distant time,
Came to this hidden pool, whose depths surpass

In crystal clearness Dian's looking-glass;
And, gazing, saw that Rose, which from the prime
Derives its name, reflected as the chime/

Of echo doth reverberate some sweet sound:
The starry treasure from the blue profound
She longed to ravish;-shall she plunge, or climb
The humid precipice, and seize the guest

Of April, smiling high in upper air?

Desperate alternative! what fiend could dare

To prompt the thought? Upon the steep rock's breast
The lonely Primrose yet renews its bloom,
Untouched memento of her hapless doom!

If we were pained a little by the ill-framing of the Basin, we cannot withhold admiration and gratitude that the approach to

THE FLUME

has been so pleasantly preserved from everything that can intrude by discordant associations upon its romantic charms. From the travelled road we pass into a rough, winding wagon-road in the forest. Leaving the wagon, we mount by a footpath that leads nearer and nearer to the sweet melody, that gives a promise to the ear which is not to be broken to the hope. Soon we reach the clean and sloping granite floors over which the water slips in thin, wide, even sheets of crystal colorlessness. Above this, we meet those gentle ripples over rougher ledges that are embossed with green. Then, still higher up, where the rocks grow more uneven, we are held by the profuse beauty of the hues shown upon the bright stones at the bottom of the little translucent basins and pools. Still above, we come to the remarkable fissure in the mountain, more than fifty feet high, and several hundred feet long, which narrows, too, towards the upper end, till it becomes only twelve feet wide, and which, doubtless, an earthquake made for the passage of the stream which the visitors are now to

ascend. We go up, stepping from rock to rock, now walking along a little plank pathway, now mounting by some rude steps, here and there crossing from side to side of the ravine by primitive little bridges, that bend under the feet and that are railed by birch-poles, and then climbing the rocks again, while the spray breaks upon us from the dashing and roaring stream, till we arrive at a little bridge which spans the narrowest part of the ravine.

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How wild the spot is! Which shall we admire most,-the glee of the little torrent that rushes beneath our feet; or the regularity and smoothness of the frowning walls through which it goes foaming out into the sunshine; or the splendor of the dripping emerald mosses

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