The Indianesque, but not very pretty name, in which this lovely body of waters rejoices, has been once or twice changed, but the force of usage has uniformly triumphed. Dr. Dwight called it Sullivan’s Lake, after Major-General Sullivan, formerly governor of the State; and the adjoining waters of Winipiseogee, he named Lake Wentworth, after another governor; but both have fallen into disuse, and the original names have reverted.
The great defect in American Lakes, generally, is the vast, unrelieved expanse of water, without islands and promontories, producing a fatigue on the eye similar to that of the sea. Squawm and Winipiseogee Lakes are exceptions to this observation. They are connected by so narrow an isthmus that five hundred dollars, it is said, would pay the expense of uniting them: and their islands together amount, it is said also, to exactly three hundred and sixty-five. As this singular coincidence has been remarked of several other lakes, however, the assertion seems rather apocryphal.
Some of the very loveliest scenery in the world lies about these two lakes, yet they are seldom visited. The country around is fertile, and sufficiently cultivated to soften the appearance of wilderness, which it might receive from the prevalency of forest, and the luxuriance of vegetation; but the mountains, which form its back-ground from every point, shutting it in like an amphitheatre, seem to seclude it from the flow of population.
Nature is a capricious beauty, and, like most other beauties, has her best looks, and her favourable times, to be seen to advantage. Beautiful as she is at Squawm Lake in the first plenitude of spring, she is more beautiful in the first flush over her face of the bright colours of autumn. The autumnal tints of our forests are peculiar to America, but there are some parts of the country where, for various reasons, this phenomenon is much more beautiful than at others. The moisture of the land about these lakes, the extreme luxuriance of the sap in consequence, and the liability of the whole of this region to sudden changes of temperature, contribute to its brilliancy. The sharp frost of a single night effects a change very often that seems almost miraculous, and the multiplication of these gawdy colours in the mirror of the surrounding waters, the bright golden, crimson, and purple islands, and the gorgeous hill-sides, all reflected and redoubled, make it a scene which the imagination never could pre-conceive. From a late publication we extract a description of this phenomenon, made from observation, and finished with some care.
“The first severe frost had come, and the miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which is known only in America. The blood-red sugar maple, with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian lip, stood here and there in the forest like the sultan’s standard in a host—the solitary and far-seen aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spirit-like and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer, turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fan-like catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun, spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about him, to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with its complainings; the hickory paled through its enduring green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash, flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the sybarite of vegetation, stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating light of noon-day in leaves than which the lip of an Indian shell was never more delicately tinted; the still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing with the noble things whose summer they had shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this universal decay, outlaws from nature, stood the fir and the hemlock; their frowning and sombre heads darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the death-struck glory of their companions.
“The dull colours of English autumnal foliage give you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon. The change here is gradual; in America it is the work of a night—of a single frost!
“Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the still green and lingering summer, and to awake in the morning to a spectacle like this!
“It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold, purple, and crimson—had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light and colour over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf in these countless trees had been painted to outflush the tulip—as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of the earth’s heart had struck upward, and her crystals and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let forth their imprisoned colours to mount through the roots of the forests, and, like the angels that in olden time entered the bodies of the dying, re-animate the perishing leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.”
