Samuel Adams Drake

“ In winter, or during violent storms, the savagery of these rocks, exposed to the full fury of the Atlantic, and surrounded by an almost perpetual surf, is overwhelming. You can with difficulty believe the island on which you stand is not reeling beneath your feet.
After exploring the shore and seeing with his own eyes the deep gashes in its mailed garment, the basins hollowed out of granite and flint, and the utter wantonness in which the sea has pitched about the fragments it has wrested from the solid rock, the futility of words in which to express this confusion comes home to the spectator. ”

“ Photography cannot reproduce the true relation of distant mountains to the landscape. The highest summits look like hills. For want of color, too, it is always twilight. Even running water has a frozen look, and rocks emit a dead, sepulchral glare. But for details—every leaf of the tree, or shadow of the leaf—it is faultless; it is the thing itself. True, under the magnifying-glass the foliage looks crisped, as is noticed after a first frost. In short, the photograph of mountain scenery is like that of a friend taken in his coffin. ”

“ The river seemed a drowsy voice rising from the depths of the forest, complaining that it alone should toil on while all else reposed. With night comes the feeling of immensity. With sleep the conviction that we are nothing, and that the order of nature disturbs itself in nothing for us. If we awake, well; if not, well again. What if we should never wake? One such splendid pageant as I have attempted to describe instinctively quenches human pride. It is true, a sunset is in itself nothing, but it compels you to admit that the world moves for itself, not for you. ”

“ Standing on the strand, we are transformed, and seem to quaff of the elixir of life. Now the violet twilight deepens into sombre shadows. A spark appears in the farther sea. Soon others shine out like glow-worms in your path; while twinkling stars, seen for a moment, disappear, as if they, too, revolved for some more distant shore. The Sound becomes a vague and heaving blackness. And now, with gentle murmurings, the rising tide effaces our wayward foot-prints. ”

“ From the meagre summits enfiladed by the north wind, and where a solitary pine or cedar intensified the desolation, to the upper forests, the mountains bristled with a scanty growth of dead or dying trees. Those scattered birches, high up the mountain side, looked like quills on a porcupine’s back; that group, glistening in the morning sun, like the pipes of an immense organ. From this line of death, which vegetation crossed at its peril, the eye dropped down over a limitless forest of dark evergreen spotted with bright yellow. The effect of the sunlight on this foliage was magical. ”

“ A few scattered remnants drifted into upper air and vanished; other masses clung to the shores as if inclined still to dispute the field. Owl's Head light-house came out at the call of the enchanter, blinking its drowsy eyes; then sunlit steeples and lofty spars glanced up and out of the fog-cloud that enveloped the city of Rockland.
The vicinity of a town had been announced by cock-crowing, the rattling of wheels, or occasional sound of a bell from some church-tower; but all these sounds seemed to heighten the illusions produced by the fog, and to endow its impalpable mass with ghostly life. ”

“ Like bees to the sweetest flowers, the artists alight on the choicest bits of scenery by instinct. One runs across their umbrellas almost everywhere, spread like gigantic mushrooms; but some of them seem only to live and have their true artistic being here. In general, they are gentle, unobtrusive, and rather subdued in the presence of their beloved mountains. Some among them, however, develop actual rapacity in the search for new subjects, as, with a pencil between their teeth, they creep in ambush to surprise and carry off some mountain beauty which you or I are to ransom. ”

“ Somesville lay beneath us, its little steeple pricking the frosty air. Cold, gray, and cheerless as their outward dress appeared, the mountains had more of impressiveness, now that they were covered from base to summit with snow. They seemed really mountains and not hills, receiving an Alpine tone with their wintry vesture.
After all, a winter landscape in New England is less gloomy than in the same zone of the Mississippi Valley, where, in the total absence of evergreen-trees, nothing but long reaches of naked forest rewards the eye, which roves in vain for some vantage-ground of relief. ”

“ The little river, tumbling step by step down its broken ledges into Jackson, comes direct from the Notch, and its stream is the thread which conducts through the labyrinth of thick woods. I dearly love the companionship of these mountain streams. They are the voices of the wilderness, singing high or low, softly humming a melodious refrain to your thoughts, or, joining innumerable cascades in one grand chorus, they salute the ear with a gush of sound that strips the forest of its loneliness and awe. This same madcap Wildcat runs shouting and hallooing through the woods like a stream possessed. ”

“ There were some terrible rents in the side of Clay, red as half-closed wounds; in one place the mountain seemed cloven to its centre. It was of this gulf that the first climber said it was such a precipice he could scarce discern to the bottom. The rifts in the walls of the ravine, the blasted fir-trees leaning over the abyss, and clutching the rocks with a death-gripe, the rocks themselves, tormented, formidable, impending, astound by their vivid portrayal of the formless, their suggestions of the agony in which these mountains were brought forth. ”

“ Dead white and steel blue rudely repulsed the sensitive eye. The north wind, cold and cutting, drove me to take shelter under glaring rocks. The cracking of ice first on one side, then on the other, diverted the attention from the landscape, as if the mountain was continually snapping its fingers in disdain. I had constantly the feeling that some one or some thing was at my elbow. What childishness! But where now was the lavish summer, the barbaric splendors of autumn—its arabesques of foliage, its velvet shadows, its dappled skies, its glow, mantling like that of health and beauty? ”

“ After this rude initiation into the mysteries of the ravine, we advanced directly up the bed of the brook. But the brook is for half a mile nothing but a succession of leaps and plunges, its course choked with bowlders. We however toiled on, from rock to rock, first boosting, then hoisting each other up; one moment splashing in a pool, the next halting in dismay under a cascade, which we must either mount like a chamois or ascend like a trout. The climber here tastes the full enjoyment of an encounter with untamed nature, which calls every thew and sinew into action. ”

“ Light seems reluctant to leave the summits. It does not wholly fade out of the west until a late hour. In a clear and starry night all the surrounding mountains can be distinguished long after the valley is steeped in darkness. At half-past nine I could easily tell the time by my watch; and even at this hour a pale, nebulous light still lingered where the sun had gone down. So at near two thousand feet above the full sea one peers over into that deeper horizon where twilight and dawn meet and embrace on the dusky threshold of midnight. ”

“ Over the pool the gray and gloomy wall of Wildcat Mountain seems stretching up to an incredible height. The astonishing wildness of the surroundings affects one very deeply. You look up. You see the firs surmounting those tall cliffs sway to and fro, as if growing dizzy with the sight of the abyss beneath them.
The Ellis Cascade is not so light as those mountain sylphs in the great Notch, which a zephyr lifts from their feet, and scatters far and wide; it is a vestal hotly pursued by impish goblins to the brink of the precipice, transformed into a water-fall. ”

“ For twenty miles it is almost as straight as an arrow. There is nothing to hinder a perfectly free and open view up or down. Contrast this with the wilful and tortuous windings of the Ammonoosuc, or the Saco, which seem to grope and feel their way foot by foot along their cramped and crooked channels. The angle of ascent, too, is here so gradual as to be scarcely noticed until the foot of the mountain wall, at its head, is reached. True, this valley is not clothed with a feeling of overpowering grandeur, but it is beautiful. ”

“ To say that the Berlin Falls begin two miles below the village is no more than the truth, since at this distance the river was sheeted in foam from shore to shore. For these two miles its bed is so thickly sown with rocks that it is like a river stretched on the rack. The whole river, every drop of it, is hemmed in by enormous masses of granite, forming a long, narrow, and rocky gorge, down which it bursts in one mad plunge, tossing and roaring like the Maelstrom. What fury! What force! The solid earth shakes, and the very air trembles. ”

“ I feel that only scant justice can be done to their wondrous beauty. All the scrubby bushes growing out of interstices of the crumbling summit—wee twig and slender filament—were stemmed with ice; while the rocks bristled with countless frost feathers. With my pitch-cakes and a few twigs I lighted a fire, which might be seen from the half-dozen villages clustered about the foot of the mountain, and pleased myself with imagining the astonishment with which a smoke curling upward from this peak would be greeted for fifty miles around. ”

“ Down the Notch is a masterpiece, hidden from the eye of the passer-by, called Ripley Falls, which fairly revels in its charming seclusion. Only a short walk from the hotel, by a woodland path, there is another, Beecher’s Cascade, whose capricious leaps and playful somersaults, all the while volubly chattering to itself, like a child alone with its playthings, fascinates us, as sky, water, and fire charm the eyes of an infant. It is always tumbling down, and as often leaping to its feet to resume its frolicsome gambols, with no loss of sprightliness or sign of weariness that we can detect. ”

“ Above these rocks we look up the stony bed of the frantic river and meet the blue mass of a distant mountain. Rocks are picturesquely dropped about the margin. Upon one side a birch leans far out over the basin, whose polished surface brilliantly reflects the white light of its bark. One sees the print of foliage on the black water, like that of ferns and grasses upon coal; or, rather, like the most beautiful Italian mosaics—black marble inlaid with arabesques of color. The illusion is more perfect still when the yellow and scarlet of the maples is reflected, as in autumn. ”

“ Thought is not freer. I do not belong to earth any more than the eagle sailing above yonder mountain-top.”
Overhead a fallen tree-trunk makes a crazy bridge from cliff to cliff. The sight of the gorge, with the flood foaming far below, the glitter of falling waters through the trees, the splendid light in the midst of deepest gloom, the solemn pines—the odorous forest, the wildness and the coolness—impart an indescribable charm to the spot that makes us reluctant to leave it. ”

“ It reveals all the magnitude, unfolds the topography of the woody wilderness stretching between the Saco and the Pemigewasset valleys. As nearly as possible, it exhibits the same amazing profusion of unbroken forest, here and there darkly streaked by hidden watercourses, as when the daring foot of the first climber pressed the unviolated crest of the august peak of Washington. In all its length and breadth there is not one object that suggests, even remotely, the presence of man. We saw not even the smoke of a hunter’s camp. All was just as created; an absolute, savage, unkempt wilderness. ”

“ The peak of Kearsarge peeps down over one shoulder into New Hampshire, over the other into Maine. It looks straight up through the open door of the Carter Notch, and boldly stares Washington in the face. It sees the sun rise from the ocean, and set behind Mount Lafayette. It patronizes Moat, measures itself proudly with Chocorua, and maintains a distant acquaintance with Monadnock. It is a handsome mountain, and, as such, is a general favorite with the ladies and the artists. Like a careful shepherd, it every morning scans the valleys to see that none of its flock of villages has wandered. ”