There lay Echo Lake, shimmering in the sun. Beyond was the hotel, its windows still boarded for winter, and on either side of it rose the mountain walls. The White Cross still kept something of its shape on Lafayette, the only snow left in sight, though almost the whole peak had been white ten days before. The cross itself must be fast going. With my glass I could see the water pouring from it in a flood. And how plainly I could follow the trail up the rocky cone of the mountain! Those were good days when I climbed it, lifting myself step by step up that long, steep, boulder-covered slope. I should love to be there now. I wonder what flowers are already in bloom. It must be too early for the diapensia and the Greenland sandwort, I imagine. Yet I am not sure. Mountain flowers are quick to answer when the sun speaks to them. Thousands of years they have been learning to make the most of a brief season. Plants of the same species bloom earlier here than in level Massachusetts. After all, alpine plants, hurried and harried as they are, true children of poverty, have perhaps the best of it. “Blessed are ye poor” may have been spoken to them also. Hardy mountaineers, blossoming in the very face of heaven, with no earthly admirers except the butterflies. I remember the splendors of the Lapland azalea in middle June, with rocks and snow for neighbors. So it will be this year, for Wisdom never faileth. I look and look, till almost I am there on the heights, my feet standing on a carpet of blooming willows and birches, and the world, like another carpet, outspread below.
But there is much else to delight me. Even here, so far below the crest of Lafayette, I am above the world. Yonder is one of my pair of deserted farms. Good hours I have had in them. Beyond is the Chase clearing, and still beyond, over another tract of woods, are the pasture lands along the road to “Mears’s.” Then comes the line of the Bethlehem road, marked by a house at long intervals—and thankful am I for the length of them. There I see my house; one of several that I have picked out for purchase, at one time and another, but have never come to the point of paying for, still less of occupying. When my friends and I have wandered irresponsibly about this country it has pleased us to be like children, and play the old game of make-believe. Some of the farmers would be astonished to know how many times their houses have been sold over their heads, and they never the wiser. Further away, a little to the right, I see the pretty farms—romantic farms, I mean, attractive to outsiders—of which I have so often taken my share of the crop from Mount Agassiz, at the base of which they nestle. To the left of all this are the village of Franconia and the group of Sugar Hill hotels, with the Landaff Valley (how green it is!) below them in the middle distance. Nearer still is the Franconia Valley, with the Tucker Brook alders, and far down toward Littleton bright reaches of Gale River.
All this fills me with exquisite pleasure. But longer than at anything else I look at the mountain forest just below me. So soft and bright this world of treetops all newly green! I have no thoughts about it; there is nothing to say; but the feeling it gives me is like what I imagine of heaven itself. I can only look and be happy.
About me are stunted, faded spruces, with here and there among them a balsam-fir, wonderfully vivid and fresh in the comparison; and after a time I discover that the short upper branches of the spruces have put forth new cones, soft to the touch as yet, and of a delicate, purplish color, the tint varying greatly, whether from difference of age or for other reasons I cannot presume to say. In this low wood, somewhere near by, a blackpoll warbler, not long from South America, I suppose, is lisping softly to himself. A myrtle warbler, less recently come, and from a less distance, has taken possession of a dead treetop, hardly higher than a man’s head, from which he makes an occasional sally after a passing insect. Between whiles he sings. Once I heard a snowbird, as I thought; but it was only the myrtle warbler when I came to look. An oven-bird shoots into the air out of the forest below for a burst of aerial afternoon music. I heard the preluding strain, and, glancing up, caught him at once, the sunlight happening to strike him perfectly. All the morning he has been speaking prose; now he is a poet; a division of the day from which the rest of us might take a lesson. But for his afternoon rôle he needs a name. “Oven-bird” goes somewhat heavily in a lyric:—
“Hark! hark! the oven-bird at heaven’s gate sings”—
you would hardly recognize that for Shakespeare.
As I shift my position, trying one after another of the seats which the rocks offer for my convenience, I notice that the three-toothed five-finger—a mountain lover, if there ever was one—is in bud, and the blueberry in blossom. The myrtle warbler sings by the hour, a soft, dreamy trill, a sound of pure contentment; and two red-eyed vireos, one here, one there, preach with equal persistency. They have taken the same text, I think, and it might have been made for them: “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little and there a little.” Right or wrong, the warbler’s lullaby is more to my taste than the vireos’ exhortation. A magnolia warbler, out of sight among the evergreens, is making an afternoon of it likewise. His song is a mere nothing; hardly to be called a “line;” but if all the people who have nothing extraordinary to say were to hold their peace, what would ears be good for? The race might become deaf, as races of fish have gone blind through living in caverns.
These are exactly such birds as one might have expected to find here. And the same may be said of a Swainson thrush and a pine siskin. A black-billed cuckoo and a Maryland yellow-throat, on the other hand, the yellow-throat especially, seem less in place. What can have brought the latter to this dry, rocky hilltop is more than I can imagine. A big black-and-yellow butterfly (Turnus) goes sailing high overhead, borne on the wind. For so unsteady a steersman he is a bold mariner. A second look at him, and he is out of sight. Common as he is, he is one of my perennial admirations. The peak of Lafayette is no more a miracle. All the flowers up there know him.
Now it is time to go. I have been here an hour and a half, and am determined to have no hurrying on the way homeward, over the old Notch road. Let the day be all alike, a day of leisure and of dreams. A last look about me, a few rods of picking my steep course downward over the rocks at the very top, and I am in the woods. Here, “my distance and horizon gone,” I please myself with looking at bits of the world’s beauty; especially at sprays of young leaves, breaking a twig here and a twig there to carry in my hand; a spray of budded mountain maple or of yellow birch. Texture, color, shape, veining and folding—all is a piece of Nature’s perfect work. No less beautiful—I stop again and again before a bed of them—are the dainty branching beech-ferns. There is no telling how pretty they are on their slender shining stems. And all the way I am taking leave of the road. I may never see it again. “Good-by, old friend,” I say; and the trees and the brook seem to answer me, “Good-by.”