The physical aspects of these mountains are marvelously beautiful. What a compact wall the tree-tops make! They seem impervious even to the sharpest lightning. Their forms give you every diversity of surface. Their outlines are never harsh or rugged, but always undulating and graceful. As the train sweeps along, now you get only the bold, precipitous wall of one mountain side. In a minute you get a view of another face. Now a chain of mountains group themselves together in a superb tableau. Now they form the gigantic setting of a peaceful green valley with a river laughing in its face, with here and there the dot of a house, and the column of thin, blue smoke no bigger than that which curls up from your cigar. The next instant the pretty vision is swept out of sight. You are thundering along on the edge of a curve right in the clutches of these Titans. The motion of the train impresses you with the idea that they are moving down upon it with resistless might, and that they will crush it like an egg-shell. You are surrounded with dense shadows. The mountains are bowing down their shaggy heads. You almost feel their weight pressing down upon you, and their breath, full of the bracing essence of life, in your face. It seems almost profanation to speak with such a presence near you, and you can only think thoughts too deep for the fashion of words. But anon, the train speeds through the sulphurous blackness of a tunnel, and you emerge into the sunlight, rolling in great waves of gold up the mountain sides, and giving you weird effects of light and shade, and constantly changing emerald tints that would mock the finest frenzy of the artist. I believe the clouds love to deck the mountains, as the sea loves to deck the shore with shells and sea-flowers. A sunrise or sunset in those mountains when the heavens are full of clouds, shows what dyes nature can use, and what forms she can mould, as you will see them nowhere else.
July 3, 1869.
[THE JUBILEE.]
Boston, June 15, 1869.
THE day of Jubilee has come.