"like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land!"
There is no general view in the White Mountains equal to this distant prospect of the Franconia Notch, in respect to picturesque majesty of outline and massive breadth. Descending into the valley, our road suddenly turns eastward, and as we begin the opposite slow ascent to the Notch, the view before us assumes a finely-grouped concentrated character—losing that diffuseness so destructive of picturesqueness and point in the American landscape generally. This scene is attempted in the accompanying sketch, showing Mount Lafayette filling the centre of the view, the irregular peaks of the Notch on the right, while below, the eye is cheered with the snug farm-house by the road-side, and other rural accessories charmingly arranged for the artist's purpose.
FRANCONIA NOTCH.
Keeping the grander points of this fine prospect before us as we continue our ascent, every step reveals more distinctly the volcano-like crest and seamed bosom of Lafayette, than which not Washington himself, though five hundred feet taller, presents a form of more august character. Lafayette is not only distinguished over his fellows by his height, but also by the rocky bareness of his peaked summit, that descends with converging rows of ravines and hemlock-topped cliffs into an immense verdant basin presented toward us. In fine weather, the dry rocks of these ravines shine like bars of silver, and after heavy rains they glisten with the torrents disappearing into the vast shadowy basin below.
No tourist that has made this ascent to the Notch during the dog-days, can forget the grateful change of the hot, treeless road, for the shady coolness of the wooded avenue he enters at the top, and through whose green twilight his now recruited steeds drag him merrily for two miles to the Lafayette House at the entrance of the Notch. Just before reaching the hotel, we see through the fine birchen groves, skirting our avenue, Echo Lake, a small sheet of water of great depth and transparency, the mountainous sides of which clothed with an unbroken forest of dreary hemlock, deprive it of all beauty of setting, or of interest aside from its marvelously distinct echoes.
The Franconia Notch hardly deserves more than the name of a pass—even for its narrowest point near the Lafayette House, where it is about a quarter of a mile in width. It has no such jaws—projecting tusks, and other palpable signs of violent disrupture, as make the expressive title of "Notch" so fitly applied to its great rival in the White Mountains. Still its features are distinctive, and grandly unique, and though not so sublimely rugged as those of its rival, they are infinitely more picturesque, and this peculiar difference of character extends to all the scenery lying within the two rival regions. But the wonder and pride of the Franconia Notch is the "Old Man" of the Profile Mountain, that forms its western wall, and which, ascending on the north side with a gradual wooded slope, to a height of two thousand feet, abruptly terminates in a perpendicular rocky precipice, five hundred feet high, which in a bare "granite front" extends along the eastern face of the mountain for two miles. An exquisite sheet of water, in size and purity similar to Echo Lake, lies between the mountain and our road, from which through a clearing, we have an admirable view of the mountain, rising wave-like from its lake—its rich rolling groves, overtopped by a pinnacle of rock, like the comb of a breaking billow, and in the fantastic outlines of that granite crest, juts out as perfect an outline of an old man's head, as human hand itself could execute!
PROFILE MOUNTAIN.
Every tourist through the White Mountains knows the propensity of the natives to increase the interest of their region, by pointing out all sorts of fancied zoological likenesses in their rocks and mountains—so that before he sees the "Old Man," he will be apt to rank him, in advance, with the facial pretensions he has already seen. But, no! this time the artist has made a hit, and the likeness is admirable. There is nothing vague, imperfect, or disproportioned about him. You are not forced to imagine a brow to the nose, or go in search of a chin to support the mouth. They are all there!—a bent, heavy brow, not stern, but earnest—a straight, sharp nose—lips thin and with the very weakness of extreme senility in their pinched-up lines—and a chin, long and massive, thrown forward with a certain air of obstinacy, that completes the character of the likeness!