Around you stand Mount Hayes, so named in honor of a worthy housekeeper; the Imp, sobriquet of a winsome and roguish little girl, who once made the house gay; the Pilot range,--because they pilot the Androscoggin down to the sea, says one to whom I never appeal in vain for facts or reasons; Mount Madison, lifting his shining head beyond an opening niched for him in the woods of a high hill-top by Mr. Hamilton Willis of Boston, whom let all men thank. I thanked him in my heart every morning, noon, and night, looking up from my seat at table to that distant peak, where otherwise I should have seen only a monotonous forest line. Over against the sunset is Mount Moriah, and Carter, and Surprise.
You know them well. You can call them all by name. But you have no sooner turned a corner than--where are they? Gone,--all changed.
Every line is altered, every contour new. Spurs have become knobs.
Peaks are ridges; summits, terraces. Madison probably has disappeared, and some Adams or Jefferson rises before you in unabashed grandeur. Carter and the Imp have hopped around to another point of the compass. All the lesser landmarks, as the old song says, "First upon the heel-tap, then upon the toe, Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so."Your topography is entirely dislocated. You must begin your acquaintance anew. Fresh lines and curves, new forms and faces and chameleon tints, thrust you off from the secrets of the Storm-Kings. While you fancy yourself to be battering down the citadel, you are but knocking feebly at the out-works. You have caught a single phase, and their name is legion. Infinite as light, infinite as form, infinite as motion, so infinite are the mountains. Purple and intense against the glowing sunset sky, the Pilot range curves its strong outlines, or shimmers steely-blue in the noonday haze. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge of their ever-vanishing and ever-returning splendors. New every morning, fresh every evening, we fancy each pageant fairer and finer than the last.
Every summer hour, a messenger from heaven, is charged with the waiting landscape, and drapes it with its own garment of woven light, celestial broidery. Sunshine crowns the crests, and stamps their kinship to the skies. Shadows nestle in the dells, flit over the ridges, hide under the overhanging cliffs, to be chased out in gleeful frolic by the slant sunbeams of the mellow afternoon. Clouds and vapors and unseen hands of heaven flood the hills with beauty. They have drunk in the warmth and life of the sun, they quiver beneath his burning glance, they lie steeped in color, gorgeous, tremulous, passionate, rosy red dropping away into pale gold, emeralds dim and sullen where they ripple down towards the darkness, dusky browns and broad reaches of blue-black massiveness, till the silent starlight wraps the scene with blessing, and the earth sitteth still and at rest.
On such an evening, never to be forgotten, we stood alone with the night. Day had gone softly, evening came slowly. There was no speech nor language, only hope and passion and purpose died gently out. Individualities were not, and we stood at one with the universe, hand in hand with the immortals, silent, listening. It was as if the heavens should give up their secret, and smite us with the music of the spheres. Suddenly, unheralded, up over the summit of Mount Moriah came the full moan, a silver disc, a lucent, steady orb, globular and grand, filling the valleys with light, touching all things into a hushed and darkling splendor. To us, standing alone, far from sight of human face or sound of human voice, it seemed the censer of God, swung out to receive the incense of the world.
Multifold mists join hands with the light to play fantastic tricks upon these mighty monarchs. The closing day is tender, bringing sacrifice and oblation; but the day of flitting clouds and frequent showers riots in changing joys. Every subordinate eminence that has arrogated to itself the sublimity of the distant mountain, against whose rocky sides it lay lost, is unmasked by the vapors that gather behind it and reveal its low-lying outlines. Every little dimple of the hills has its chalice of mountain wine. The mist stretches above the ridge, a long, low, level causeway, solid as the mountains themselves, which buttress its farther side, a via triumpha, meet highway for the returning chariot of an emperor. It rears itself from the valleys, a dragon rampant and with horrid jaws. It flings itself with smothering caresses about the burly mountains, and stifles them in its close embrace. It trails along the hills, floating in filmy, parting gauze, scattering little flecks of pearl, fringing itself over the hollows, and hustling against a rocky breastwork that bars its onward going. It wreathes upward, curling around the peaks and veiling summits, whose slopes shine white in the unclouded sun. It shuts down gray, dense, sombre, with moody monotone. It opens roguishly one little loop-hole, through which--cloud above, cloud below, cloud on this side and on that--you see a sweet, violet-hued mountain-dome, lying against a background of brilliant blue sky,--just for one heart-beat, and it closes again, gray, sheeted, monotonous.
Leaving the valley, and driving along the Jefferson road, you have the mountains under an entirely new aspect. Before, they stood, as it were, endwise. Now you have them at broadside.
