The Owaga here is scarce a quarter of a mile from its junction with the Susquehanna, and the lawn of Glenmary is the western limit of the star of interval land formed by the union of two broad valleys. The river here is a secluded stream, shadowed originally with dark forest trees, and running deep and still. The farm of Glenmary, part of which is presented in the drawing, was once an Indian burial-place—warrant enough for its possessing the highest rural beauty. The plough has turned up many skeletons in the fields above, and a small museum of Indian weapons and domestic implements was collected by the gentleman from whom the land was bought by the writer. Off to the left of the drawing, (too far off to be brought into the sketch,) a bright and brawling brook comes leaping down from the hills, and passing by the cottage door crosses the meadow to pay tribute to the Owaga; and back from the meadow, by broad and easy terraces, the land rises to the summit of a mountain ridge, crowned with primeval and gigantic forest trees. Having possessed the reader thus of the principal features of the spot, I may be excused for filling a page from an epistle to a friend, descriptive of the artist’s visit, to Glenmary.
“This is not a very prompt answer to your last, my dear doctor, for I intended to have taken my brains to you bodily, and replied to all your ‘whether-or-noes’ over a broiled oyster at Downing’s. Perhaps I may bring this in my pocket. A brace of ramblers, brothers of my own, detained me for a while, but are flitting to-day; and Bartlett has been here a week, to whom, more particularly, I wish to do the honours of the scenery. We have climbed every hill-top that has the happiness of looking down on the Owaga and Susquehanna, and he agrees with me that a more lovely and habitable valley has never sat to him for its picture. Fortunately, on the day of his arrival, the dust of a six-weeks’ drought was washed from its face, and, barring the wilt that precedes Autumn, the hill-sides were in holiday green, and looked their fairest. He has enriched his portfolio with four or five delicious sketches, and if there were gratitude or sense of renown in trees and hills, they would have nodded their tops to the two of us. It is not every valley and pine-tree that finds painter and historian, but these are as insensible as beauty and greatness were ever to the claims of their trumpeters.
“How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett’s visit to Constantinople? Not more than four or five weeks, it seems to me; and yet here he is, on his return from a professional trip to Canada, with all its best scenery snug in his portmanteau! He steamed to Turkey and back, and steamed again to America, and will be once more in England in some twenty days—having visited and sketched the two extremities of the civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susquehanna, and keep my town-house in Constantinople, (with money.) It seemed odd to me to turn over a drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly pencilled sketch of a mosque, and on the next a view of Glenmary—my turnip-field in the foreground. And then the man himself—pulling a Turkish para and a Yankee shin-plaster from his pocket with the same pinch—shuffling to breakfast in my abri on the Susquehanna, in a pair of peaked slippers of Constantinople, that smell as freshly of the bazaar as if they were bought yesterday—waking up with “pekke! pekke! my good fellow!” when William brings him his boots—and never seeing a blood-red maple (just turned with the frost), without fancying it the sanguine flag of the Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek! All this unsettles me strangely. The phantasmagoria of my days of vagabondage flit before my eyes again. This, ‘By-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?’ and, ‘The view you recollect from the Seraglio!’ and such like slip-slop of travellers, heard within reach of my corn and pumpkins, affects me like the mad poet’s proposition,
‘To twitch the rainbow from the sky,
And splice both ends together.’
“I have amused my artist friend since he has been here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful—the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three or four young men who have been staying with us, were very content to tramp into the woods, with a bundle of straw and a match-box; and they have been initiated into the mysteries of ‘picking and piling,’ to the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glenmary. Shelly says,
‘Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,’
and I am inclined to think that there are varieties of glory in its phenomena which would make it worth even your metropolitan while to come to the west and ‘burn fallow.’ At this season of the year—after the autumn droughts, that is to say—the whole country here is covered with a thin smoke, stealing up from the fires on every hill, in the depths of the woods, and on the banks of the river; and what with the graceful smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing heavens all around the horizon by night, it adds much to the variety, and I think, more to the beauty of our western October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood by the pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in the disforested Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a crackling wood, and toast himself by a thousand cords burnt for the riddance. What experience I have had of these holocausts on my own land, has not diminished the sense of waste and wealth with which I first watched them. Paddy’s dream of ‘rolling in a bin of gould guineas,’ could scarcely have seemed more luxurious.
“Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way, burnt up enough, I dare say, to have made a comfortable drawing-room of Hyde Park in January, and the effects of the white light upon the trees above and around were glorious. But our fires were piles of logs and brush—small beer of course to the conflagration of a forest. I have seen one that was like the Thousand Columns of Constantinople, ignited to a red heat, and covered with carbuncles and tongues of flame. It was a temple of fire—the floor living coals—the roof a heaving drapery of crimson—the aisles held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, and sometimes swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked redness, while the eye could see far into their depths, and again covered and wreathed and laved in ever-changing billows of flame. We want an American Tempesta or ‘Savage Rosa’ to ‘wreak’ such pictures on canvass; and perhaps the first step to it would be the painting of the foliage of an American Autumn.”