Being nearly destitute of forest covering, and showing large masses of bare quartz, it presents very beautiful and striking harmonies of the grays with neutral hues of blue and white, and at sunrise and sunset exhibits proportional increase of splendor. The Sandwich

range, too, affords ample and important subjects to the dwellers in Campton for the enjoyment and study of mountain color and form. In all lights they are picturesque if not beautiful; but there is no limit to the softness, purity, and magnificence of color with which the setting sun sometimes floods their broad and rugged sides.

Of course the Franconia mountains form one of the leading attractions in the landscape here, West Campton being the southernmost point in the valley from which they can be advantageously seen. As

they are visible from the meadow as well as from the hill-sides, the choice of several different combinations of middle and foregrounds is offered to all artists, and to those who love complex and proportioned beauty in the landscapes near their summer resting-place. We have known artists to say that the marvellous middle ground of belt and copse, and meadow and river, back of which the three sharp spires of Lafayette and his associates tower, to face the heavier rocky wall which forms the western rampart of the Notch, is the most enchanting scene of the kind which this valley and that of the Saco can offer. In common daylight there is very little variety or picturesqueness in their aspect. No doubt persons who have seen mountains only under a dull sky, or through a very clear air, on a bright day, between the hours of nine and four, suppose that all descriptions of their splendor are either deliberately manufactured for the sake of fine writing, or illusions of fancy, proofs that

we receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live.

But let them study the Notch mountains of Franconia from the school-house in Campton, by the morning or evening light. They differ then from their ordinary aspects as much as rubies and sapphires from pebbles. See the early day pour down the upper slopes of the three easterly pyramids; then upon the broad forehead of the Profile Mountain, kindling its gloomy brows with radiance, and melting the azure of its temples into pale violet; and falling lower, staining with rose tints the cool mists of the ravines, till the Notch seems to expand, and the dark and rigid sides of it fall away as they lighten, and recede in soft perspective of buttressed wall and flushed tower,-and then say whether, to an eye that can never be satiated with the blue of a hyacinth, the purple of a fuschia, and the blush of a rose, the gorgeousness ascribed to the mountains is a mere exercise of rhetoric, or a fiction of the fancy. Or, towards evening of midsummer, at the same spot, see the great hills assume a deeper blue or purple ; see the burly Cannon Mountain stand, a dark abutment, at the gate

of the Notch, unlighted except by its own pallor; and, as the sun goes down, watch his last beams of crimson or orange cover with undevastating fire the pyramidal peaks of the three great Haystacks,

of

and then decide whether language can recall or report the pomp the spectacle, any more than the cold colors of art can exaggerate what the Creator writes there in chaste and glowing flame.

Then, as if the earth and sea had been

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light, and made

Their very peaks transparent.

some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what tenderness in color means at all. Bright tenderness he may, indeed, see in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot conceive.”

And now with the mountains in our mind's eye, from a point so favorable as Campton for enjoying their beauty, let us, before making a closer acquaintance with the Notch, raise the question of their se. Nothing is sublimer to the senses than a great mountain, though many other objects and forces of Nature are immeasurably more sublime to thought. A structure like Illimani or Aconcagua of the Andes, towering nearly five miles above the contented clods, bearing up the pine to look down upon the palm, defying the force of gravitation,

Standing alone 'twixt the earth and the heavens,
Heir of the sunset and herald of morn,

thrills the eye by the heroic energy with which the soaring mass seems to be vital, and by which of its own will it cleaves the air and converses with the sky. And yet what insignificant things they are, after all, when we measure them by our thought, in their relation to the surface and depth of the globe! On the rim of a race-course a mile in circuit, if it could be lifted up as a great wheel, a pebblestone three inches high would be larger in proportion than Mount Lafayette is, as a bunch on the planet itself. The thickness of a sheet of writing paper on an artificial sphere a foot in diameter, represents the eminence of the mountain chains. They are no more than the cracks in the varnish of such a ball. The roughnesses on the skin of an Havana orange are more marked than Chimborazo, Kinchin-Junga, and the valley of the Jordan, are upon the earth. And yet these trifling elevations and scratches reveal the heights and soundings of our knowledge of the planet.

What do we know of the four thousand miles radius of the earth? What do we know of the air above the highest mountain tops? It

grows rarer as we ascend; and but a few miles above the highest of the Himalayas, no doubt, there is blackness of darkness, except to an eye that should turn directly to the sun. The domain of light and of knowledge lies within this petty film, whose top is nearly touched by the little mountain beads that slightly roughen the roundness of the

world. Peel a pellicle from the planet, thinner in proportion than the thinnest of the laminæ of an onion, and all our science and wisdom, and all life, too, will be stripped off.

Yet, think of the uses of the little inequalities that we call mountains. Think of their service to the intellect. They are not excrescences on the globe's surface,-ridges of superfluous matter bolted upon the original smoothness of our orb. Many of our readers pos