“Wak’d by the circling hours, with rosy hand
Unbarr’d the gates of light;”
or, when in the language of Shakspeare,
“The grey-eyed morn smiled on the frowning night,
Checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light.”
Wonderfully vast, and strangely indistinct and dreamy, was the scene spread out on every side. To the west lay the superb Connecticut, with its fertile valley reposing in the gloom of night; while to the east, the ocean-bounded prospect, just bursting into the life of light, was faintly relieved by Winnepiseogee and Sebago lakes; and, like rockets along the earth, wandered away the Merrimack, the Saco, and the Androscoggin, to their ocean home,—the whole forming an epic landscape, such as we seldom behold excepting in our sleep. Heavens! with what exquisite delight did I gaze upon the scene, as in the eyes of truth and fancy it expanded before my mind. Yonder, in one of a hundred villages, a young wife, with her first-born child at her side, was in the midst of her morning dream; and there, the pilgrim of fourscore years was lying on his couch in a fitful slumber, as the pains of age crept through his frame. There, on the Atlantic shore, the fisherman in the sheltering bay, hoisted anchor and spread his sail for the sea; and there, the life-star of the lighthouse was extinguished, again at its stated time to appear with increased brilliancy. In reality, there was an ocean of mountains all around me; but in the dim light of the hour, and as I looked down upon them, it seemed to me that I stood in the centre of a plain, boundless as the universe; and though I could not see them, I felt that I was in a region of spirits, and that the summit of the mount was holy ground. But the morning was advancing, the rising mists obscured my vision, and as I did not wish to have that day-break picture dissipated from my mind, I mounted my faithful horse, and with a solemn awe at heart, descended the mountain.
The ride from the Notch House, (kept by the celebrated hunter, named Crawford), through the Notch Valley, some twelve miles long, is magnificent. First is the Gap itself, only some twenty feet in width, and overhung with jagged rocks of wondrous height; and then the tiny spring, alive with trout, which gives birth to the untamed Saco. A few more downward steps, and you are in full view of a bluff, whose storm-scathed brow seems to prop the very heavens, its grey shadows strongly contrasting with the deep blue sky. A little further on, and you find yourself in an amphitheatre of mountains, whose summits and sides are barren and desolate, where the storms of a thousand years have exhausted their fury. Downward still, and farther on, and you come to the memorable Wiley cottage, whose inhabitants perished in the avalanche or slide of 1826. The storm had been unceasing for some days upon the surrounding country, and the dwellers of the cottage were startled at midnight by the falling earth. They fled, and were buried in an instant; and up to the present time, only one of the seven bodies has ever been found. As it then stood, the dwelling still stands—a monument of mysterious escape, as well as of the incomprehensible decrees of Providence. The Saco river, which runs through the valley, was lifted from its original bed, and forced into a new channel. The whole place, which but a short time before was “a beautiful and verdant opening amid the surrounding rudeness and deep shadow, is now like a stretch of desolate sea-shore after a tempest,—full of wrecks, buried in sand and rocks, crushed and ground to atoms.”
After witnessing so much of the grand and gloomy, I was glad to retrace my course back to a more tame country. My last view of Mount Washington and its lordly companions was the most beautiful. The sun was near his setting, and the whole sky was suffused with a glow of richest yellow and crimson, while to the eastward hung two immense copper-coloured clouds just touching the outline of the mountains; and through the hazy atmosphere the mountains themselves looked cloud-like, but with more of the bright blue of heaven upon them. In the extensive middle distance faded away wood-crowned hills, and in the foreground an exquisite little farm, with the husbandman’s happy abode almost hidden by groups of elms, and with the simple figures, only a few paces off, of a little girl sitting on a stone, with a bunch of summer flowers in her hand, and a basket of berries and a dog at her side. One more yearning gaze upon the dear old mountains, and I resumed my pilgrimage towards the north.
CHAPTER X.
Montreal.