laid in the finish of groovings and chasings by way of delicate onnament. Nature had put her rival ministers of grandeur and grace at work in the two streams that channelled this snow-heap with patient and merry chisels,-one leaving, as the witness of its fidelity, the sombre and masculine proportions of the cave, the other flowing under the cheerful feminine beauty of the ceiling it had wrought. Ah, the romantic economy, too, of that ceaseless mining and sculpture! Where shall we find the rubbish and the chips? All the waste turns to leaping and fleecy beauty, far below, on the mossy stairs of the Crystal Cascade. It feeds the roots of wild flowers; it bears down nutriment to dainty and scarlet-freckled trout; it carries coolness to human lips and melody to careworn hearts;—all this before it pours into the Ellis stream, and plunges over the Glen Ellis cataract, and again over the Jackson falls, on its way to the Saco, that it may do wider service in that tide, before it dies into the sea.

"The spot furnished an entirely new experience of the White Mountains. I had not expected to be thrilled with such surprise, so near the summit of Mount Washington, which I had visited so often. The stupendous amphitheatre of stone would of itself repay and overpay the labor of the climb. It is fitly called the Mountain Colosseum.' No other word expresses it, and that comes spontaneously to the lips. The eye needs some hours of gazing and comparative measurement to fit itself for an appreciation of its scale and sublimity. One can hardly believe, while standing there, that the sheer concave sweep of the back wall of the ravine was the work of an earthquake throe. It seems as though Titanic geometry and trowels must have come in to perfect a primitive volcanic sketch. One might easily fancy it the Stonehenge of a Preadamite race, the unroofed ruins of a temple reared by ancient Anaks long before the birth of man, for which the dome of Mount Washington was piled as the western tower. There have been landslides and rock-avalanches as terrible n that ravine as at Dixville Notch, the teeth of the frosts have been as pitiless, the desloation of the cliffs is as complete, but the spirit of the place is not so gloomy as at Dixville,-is sublime rather than

A

awful or dispiriting. At Dixville, all is decay, wreck; the hopeless submission of matter in the coil of its hungry foes. In Tuckerman's Ravine there is a grand battle of granite against storm and frost, a Roman resistance, as though it could hold out for ages yet before the siege of winter, and all the batteries of the air.

"But I must close. Of course we dined under the snow-arch. Between the pie and cheese there were eloquent parentheses of admiration for the crystal cave, and wonder at the proportions of the Colosseum. We pledged our host, Mr. M., and drank to the success of his road. Never was hospitality acknowledged in a more glorious hall, and the pledge was drunk in pure ice-water fresh from February There is no time to tell you of our climbing the cliffs of the ravine to the summit of Mount Washington. Just before we began to ascend by the sheer and treacherous-looking wall, Mr. M. gave us a noble recitation of the following passage from Scott's 'Rokeby,' and one of our party came near verifying the experience which Bertram would have had if his final leap had not proved successful :

As bursts the levin in its wrath,

He shot him down the sounding path;
Rock, wood, and stream rung wildly out,
To his loud step and savage shout.
Seems that the object of his race
Hath scaled the cliffs; his frantic chase
Sidelong he turns, and now 'tis bent
Right up the rock's tall battlement:
Straining each sinew to ascend,

Foot, hand, and knee their aid must lend,
Wilfrid, all dizzy with dismay,
Views, from beneath, his dreadful way:
Now to the oak's warp'd roots he clings,
Now trusts his weight to ivy strings;
Now, like the wild goat, must he dare
An unsupported leap in air;

Hid in the shrubby rain-course now,
You mark him by the crashing bough,
And by his corselet's sullen clank,
And by the stones spurned from the bank,
And by the hawk scared from her nest,
And ravens croaking o'er their guest,
Who deem his forfeit limbs shall pay
The tribute of his bold essay.

See, he emerges!-desperate now
All further course-Yon beetling brow
In craggy nakedness sublime

What heart or foot shall dare to climb?
It bears no tendril for his clasp,
Presents no angle to his grasp:
Sole stay his foot may rest upon,
Is yon earth-bedded jetting stone.
Balanced on such precarious prop,
He strains his grasp to reach the top.
Just as the dangerous stretch he makes,
By heaven, his faithless footstool shakes!
Beneath his tottering bulk it bends,
It sways, it loosens,-it descends!
And downward holds its headlong way,
Crashing o'er rock and copsewood spray.
Loud thunders shake the echoing dell!-
Fell it alone?-alone it fell.

Just on the very verge of fate,

The hardy Bertram's falling weight

He trusted to his sinewy hands,

And on the top unharmed he stands!

I reached the Glen House before nine, and Gorham about ten, that evening, with a strong desire to repeat the visit, and with the conviction that every lover of impressive scenery will find Tuckerman's Ravine a spot that will repay trebly the toils of a day's excursion."

Not less than five thousand persons make the ascent of Mount Washington, every summer, by the regular bridle-paths. There is year by year now, however, an increasing proportion of visitors who desire more loneliness and wildness in the track, and more adventure in the experience, than the commonly travelled routes to the summit will supply. For all such the northerly side of the ridge, as the noble scenery around its base becomes better known, will prove very attractive. The writer first became acquainted with the pictures which the northerly portion of the ridge reveals, in an excursion over Mount Adams, which was thus reported in the Boston Transcript :

"If any of your readers have ever driven from Gorham to Jefferson, on what is called the 'Cherry Mountain road to the Notch,' they

cut to the very Seen from the

have noticed the ravine of Mount Adams, which is heart, and up to the throat of the noble mountain. road below, it is the most spacious and the grandest of all the gorges that have been cloven out of the White Hills. It is of an excursion up the tilted floor of this granite gulf that I sit down to write you now. How often, in riding along the road in Randolph, where its lines of lifted forest subside into the verdure of the valley, have I looked with longing up to its sheer and sharp-edged walls,—and farther up to its smooth-faced ledges blazing like mirrors with sunshine upon their moisture,-up to cascades that shook feathery silver over dwindled precipices,-up to the curving rampart that unites the two sides of the chasm, and supports the mountain's rocky spire! There, I have said to myself, the very spirit of the hills is concentrated. There the wildness, freshness, and majesty which carriage-roads' and hurrying feet and Tip-Top Houses' are driving or disenchanting from Mount Washington, are as undisturbed as when the Indians warned the daring pioneers of civilization from ascending Agiochook, on peril of the Great Spirit's wrath.

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Mark how the climbing Oreads
Beckon thee to their arcades.

"Yet the ravine was generally believed to be unscalable. No guide or hunter could tell what attractions it concealed, or the probable character of the ground. No party, so far as we could learn, had ever been through it. But Mr. Gordon, who is as much at home in the woods as a bear, and who gets along without a compass in their thickets, by having the instinct of a bee, was ready and anxious to take charge of any person or company that would try to explore and scale it. So I endeavored to muster a small band for the attempt under his lead, knowing that we should all be safe in his charge and under his counsel. He is acquainted with the wilderness of the White Mountains as David knew the forests of Ziph, or Solomon the botany of Palestine. Last year, however, I was not successful in my efforts to collect recruits. But this month I found

enough to justify the trial. A lawyer of Boston, who proved himself a thoroughly furnished wood-man, a clergyman, an artist, and your correspondent, were the quartette of novices, and with our admirable guide formed a harmonious, and as it turned out, a competent quintette club' for the excursion.

"Tuesday, the eleventh, in the afternoon, was the time for starting. It had rained in the morning. The clouds were heavy and dark after dinner, and blanketed the mountains. But the wind was

favorable, and, according to Mr. Gordon's barometrical instinct, the signs were auspicious for the succeeding day. Some friends were kind enough to escort us from the Alpine House to the base of Adams, two miles beyond the farther side of Randolph Hill, where we were to strike into the forest. Just as we arrived opposite Madison, the cloak and cap of mist were thrown off, and the symmetrical mountain saluted us in an aristocratic suit of blue-black velvet. And

as we reached the point where we were to leave the wagon, the fog lifted from the ravine also. Both its sides, its upper plateau, and its