The ascent of Marcy is singularly easy for a mountain of such height—one of the highest, indeed, this side of the Rocky range. I confess I had rather dreaded the climb, from an experience of Black Mountain, on Lake George. I was therefore quite agreeably surprised. On the other hand, I was almost equally disappointed by the view from the Cloud-splitter’s top. (Tahawus—i.e., Cloud-splitter—is the old Indian name for the mountain. What a
pity it was changed!—“nearly as barbarous as giving the name of one of Thackeray’s “Four Georges” to the beautiful Lac du Saint-Sacrement. Far better to have restored the Indian name—Horicon, Holy Lake.) It is rarely, I suppose, that a perfectly clear view is to be had from these mountains. We, probably, saw little more than half the horizon commanded by the height at which we stood. What we did see was worth seeing, certainly. Still, I, at least, remembered an incomparably finer view from the well-named Prospect Mountain at the head of Lake George.
Lake George we could not see, but only where it was. A number of small lakes were pointed out to us by the guide, among them the “Tear of the Clouds,” one of the reputed sources of the Hudson. This wretched little pond—for such it proved when we passed it on our way towards Lake Colden that afternoon—looked far from deserving of its poetical name, even at a distance; for we could see that it was yellow, being, in fact, a very shallow affair, and more like a stagnant marsh than a crystalline tear. They might as well have given some sidereal appellation to the sun-reflector which Mr. Colvin has erected on the exact apex of Marcy—a few sheets of tin, some of which had been torn off; for when, three days later, we were many miles away, we beheld this apparatus glittering like a star in the rays of the setting sun.
But here let me moralize a moment. Those to whom “high mountains are a feeling,” as they were to the “Pilgrim poet,” will not scale them purely for the view they afford, much less for the sake of vaunting a creditable feat. They will understand the longing so nobly expressed by Keats:
“To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world and worldling meant.”
That is, they will feel at home on mountain-tops, because uplifted from the transitory and the sordid, and reminded what it is to belong to eternity. But then, on the other hand, unless, with Wordsworth, they “have ears to hear”
“The still, sad music of humanity,”
they will miss the real lesson which the “wonder-works of God and Nature’s hand” are meant to teach—to wit, the infinitely greater worth and beauty of a single human soul, even the lowest and most degraded, as a world in which are wrought, or can be wrought, the “wonder-works” of grace. The love of Nature never yet made a misanthrope. The poet who could write