BY A. OAKLEY HALL.
I have "laid" the tiniest ghost of my professional duties. I shook off city dust twenty hours ago, and my lungs are rejoicing this August morning with the glorious breezes that sweep from the summits of the "Trimountains" of Waywayanda lake—that stretches its ten miles expanse before my freshened vision.
Waywayanda lake?
A Quere. Shall I play geographer to those who are learned in the nomenclature of snobbism? Who allow innkeepers and railroad guides to assassinate Aboriginal terms in order that petty pride may exult in petty fame? No! But if snobbism has a curiosity, I refer it to the first landscape painter of its vicinage: or the nearest fisherman amateur: or the Recorder of New-York: or sportsman Herbert and the pages of his "Warwick Woodlands;" a list of references worthy of the spot.
And as I gaze and breathe I feel as if the waters before me had bubbled from the fountains of rejuvenescence for which Ponce de Leon so enthusiastically searched in the everglades of Florida; and as if, too, I had just emerged from their embraces.
My pocket almanac says that I am living in the dogdays. Perhaps so. But "Sirius" hath no power around these mountains and primeval solitudes. Were the fiercest theological controversialist at my elbow, he would be as cool as an Esquimaux.
I feel at peace with all things. My friend M. says the conscience lieth in the stomach. Perhaps so; and perhaps I owe my quietude of spirit to the influence of as comforting a breakfast as ever blessed the palate of a scientific egg-breaker.
Shall I join forces with the laughing beauties who are handling maces in the billiard room of the inn hard by? Shall I challenge my "Lady Gay Spanker" of last night's acquaintance to a game of bowling? Shall I tempt the unsophisticated pickerel of the lake under the shadow of yonder frowning precipice, with glittering bait? Shall I clamber the mountain side and feast my vision with an almost boundless view—rich expanses of farm land stretching away for miles and miles, and edging themselves in the blue haze of the horizon where the distant Catskill peaks rise solitary in their sublimity?
It is very comfortable here. Is there always poetry in motion? How far distant are the confines of dreamland: that magical kingdom where the tired soul satiates itself in the intoxications of fancy?
I had just carefully deposited upon a velvety tuft of grass Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor." I had arrived at the conclusion that its pages should be part and parcel of the landscape about. Surely there is a unison between them both. There are always certain places where only certain melodies can be sung to the proper harmony of the heart-strings. Who ever learned "Thanatopsis" on the summit of the Catskills, and afterwards forgot a line of it? Now I have seen these same "Reveries" of the said bachelor upon many a centre-table: in the lap of many a town beauty, half cushioned in the velvet of a drawing room sofa: but the latter half of the volume never looked so inviting as it does here just in the middle of one of nature's lexicons. May the page of it never be blurred.