The chains are rent, the dungeon's gloom
No more these active limbs confine.
I rise as from the dreary tomb,
Where long in prison I repined.
I mount—I fly—I haste away,
Buoyed, as it were, on angel's wings;
O home! O friends! O liberty!—
O God of strength, thy praise I'll sing.
Hosanna now in highest strains,
Glory to God and to the Lamb,
Hosanna to the king who reigns
In heaven and earth—the great I Am.
VISIT TO THE WHITE MOUNTAINS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE.
[Extract from the Author's Journal.]
When we came near the base of the mountain, two beautiful and transparent lakes, surrounded with a romantic forest of evergreen, and other trees, added greatly to the interest of the scene. Between these lakes a mansion was reared for the public entertainment of those whom curiosity draws to the place. This house furnished pleasure boats, fishing apparatus, guides, &c., for the accommodation of parties of pleasure, and others who wished to spend a few hours amid these romantic and picturesque scenes of sublimity and grandeur, where nature in her wildest freaks had combined the gentle and lovely, which seems to soothe and calm the spirits with the awfully grand, the terribly majestic, and the wild and romantic, as if calculated at once to interest the curious, to please the merry, to add gloom to solitude, and fervor to devotion; and in a word, to fill the contemplative mind with the highest degree of wonder and admiration. Our road led directly between the two small lakes, through what is called the notch. The mountains on each hand reared their majestic piles almost perpendicular for many hundred feet.
While clouds hung lowering on their bosoms,
And their tall summits high above
The misty vapors stood in awful pride,
And still serenely smiled amid clear skies,
And all the splendor of the morning sun.
When we had passed between the lakes and walked a short distance, we left the road and took a footpath to the left hand, and commenced our ascent up the steep sides of the mountain. Our path for many hundred feet was very steep, and in many places almost perpendicular; but the rough fragments of rock afforded steps; and these, together with twigs and shrubs which we seized with our hands, enabled us to climb with some degree of safety as well as speed. When we had arrived at the distance of perhaps half a mile, the scene was truly awful. Huge fragments of rock were thrown together in inconceivable confusion, as if by some terrible convulsion of nature; recalling to mind a time long since passed, when
Earth with a tremendous groan,
Did for a dying Jesus mourn.
Passing still onward on our airy way, the timber began to be of a different variety, suited to a colder climate, and fast diminishing in its size, until at length we were only surrounded with dwarf cedars, or spruce; and still higher up, even these ceased to vegetate, and a bleak, bald, and rocky summit still reared its dreary head a vast distance above us. At the point where vegetation ceased, we found a small lake several rods in circumference probably fed by the melting snows which lay upon the mountain most of the year.