“To me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture,”
had been stung into misanthropy before he “fled” to Nature, and would rather have found in Nature’s bosom a sublime and tender love of mankind, had he not possessed (as some one has well said of him) “the eagle’s wing without the eagle’s eye,” so that “while he soared above the world” he “could not gaze upon the sun of Truth.”
Such having been my cogitations as I stood on Mt. Marcy, you will not think it pedantry that I record them here.
Descending, we returned to the camp at the Notch, where we had left our baggage, then struck into the trail for the Iron-Works (of which anon). This trail, though well worn, is very tiresome, owing to the number of trees that have fallen across it, obliging you to crawl a good deal. But we were glad to have seen the “Flumes” of the “Opalescent”—another poetic
name, which obviously means “beginning to be opal,” or resembling that hue. But, unfortunately, there are various kinds of opal; and since the water had nothing of a milky tinge, the bestower of the name must have meant the brown opal, an impure and inferior sort. I therefore deem the name infelicitous. The only color-epithet for clear and shallow waters, whether running or still, is amber. Witness Milton, in Paradise Lost:
“Where the river of bliss through midst of heaven
Rolls o’er Elysian flowers her amber stream.”
And again, in Comus: