McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 6, November 1893

Transcriber’s Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added by the transcriber.


Copyright, 1893, by S. S. MCCLURE, Limited. All rights reserved.
Recorded by Miss Thomas.
Nature provides no lovelier mise-en-scène for a story, a poem or, a “conversation” than is to be found in the sylvan and pastoral world that looks out upon the gradual crescendo of the Blue Ridge mountains in northern New Jersey.
“Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks——”
Tall beeches, hickories, chestnuts, and maples, too, rise on all sides to clothe fertile slope or wilder acclivity. Those who have never experimentally proved what riches the landscape-loving eye counts for its own in this portion of the State may still hold to the calumnious tradition that all Jersey is flat and unprofitable to the searcher for the beautiful in pictorial nature. There is no hilltop of this gracious country that does not rise to salute some yet more sightly hill; no sunny hollow or winding dell that does not seem the key to some Happy Valley beyond, where a Rasselas might be content to abide forever; no woodland glade that would not satisfy Leigh Hunt’s description,
“Places of nestling green, for poets made.”
MISS EDITH M. THOMAS.
Yet it would hardly be judicious for a poet to live here, lest he should be diverted altogether from thoughts of work, and, like the bees in Florida, lend himself to present enjoyment, without forecast of the morrow.