MAUVAISE HONTE. BY OLIVER W. B. PEABODY. IN your manhood's gravest hour, Close around you, night and day. Wealth may throw its garlands o'er you, In the ball-room you shall sigh, Stands before the basilisk. Every moment to your cheek You shall stammer, stare and blush; What you would have said, delaying, What you should not, ever saying; While each friend in wonder sits, Mourning your departed wits. When in love, you shall seem cold When you labor to be bold, Sparrows might more courage boast. When most gay, most solemn seeming; When attentive, as if dreaming: Niobé could teach you how You might make a better bow. Ask me not to break the chain, Go and marry MOUNTAINS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. BY ISAAC HILL. THE highest mountains within the known limits of the old thirteen United States are the cluster in New Hampshire I called the White Mountains. These mountains are supposed to be older than any of the ranges of high mountains in Europe. Mont Blanc and Mont St. Bernard may peer above them, and reach their tops beyond the line of perpetual congelation; but Mount Washington had been thousands of years in existence before the internal fires upheaved the European Alps. Of the useless things in creation, I had taught myself in early youth to consider ragged mountains and hills as least of all valuable. Fastnesses for the retreat of wild beasts, my first recollections almost identify them with the frightful catamount that tore in pieces the man whom he was able to carry into the limbs of some tree incumbent upon another half way in its fall; with the bear, who was said to carry off children with which to feed her young; or with the voracious wolf, who would slay an entire flock of sheep sometimes in a single night. If these mountains were no longer a nuisance as harbors for wild beasts, the obstacles which they presented to the making of good and easy travelled roads connecting one part of the country with another; the space which they occupied precluding that easy cultivation which we were wont to see in more level regions, gave them no better aspect than that of incumbrances which must forever be inconvenient to the population which surrounded them. I have changed my mind entirely on this matter; and if we may be said to grow wiser as we grow older, I have just that kind of conceit of myself which might call for your re MOUNTAINS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. 73 buke if I am now under a mistake. Perhaps you think of these mountains as I once thought of them. With me when a child stubbing my toes against the rocks or carrying some burden up the steep cliffs, having dreamed of the beauty of a level country where there was not a rock or a hill in the way, you may have been instructed into a poor opinion of our mountains. The mountain region of New England is almost entirely free from those contagious diseases which sweep over the country at each annual return of decayed vegetation. The pure water and the clear mountain air give to her inhabitants as good if not better health than is enjoyed by any other people on earth. This is the land of iron constitutions, of noble and beautiful forms, of hearts of steel, of boundless resolution that heeds no obstacle, of enterprise and perseverance which know no discouragement. What part of the United States, what city upon the Atlantic seaboard, what district of country growing into wealth and respectability in the interior, that is not indebted to New England, to the beautiful hill country of New England, for much of that noble spirit which has hastened them on in the grand march of improvement? I have entirely changed my mind within the last few years in relation to the most rough country of New England. So far from looking upon the rocks, the pebbles, the gravel or the sand composing them as so much matter in the way adapted to no possible useful service, I see them as the sources of that fertility which is sooner or later destined to make the territory now composing the six New-England States capable of sustaining ten times its present population. On the higher White Mountains no traces of the valuable and useful metals, as yet, have been discovered upon the surface or in the beds excavated by the avalanches. The Indians had a tradition that there were carbuncles and precious gems upon the open grounds of the mountains above the region of vegetation, which were kept from the possession of mortals by the enchantment which surrounded them. The notion probably originated in the fact that travelling in the sunshine the reflection of isolated rock crystal strikes upon the eye at a distance with dazzling brightness, which entirely disappears on change of position or on approaching to the spot where it was first observed. These appearances are frequent upon the open upper grounds of these mountains, and have probably given them the name of the Crystal Hills. The mountain streams, particularly those in the northern region of New Hampshire, are rife with salmon trout, a fish of more delicious flavor than any other that sports in American waters; as much superior to the perch and suckers and chubs that are to be found in sluggish pools and streams, as the running water of the cold mountain brook is more grateful to the parched throat than the standing liquid of a summer frog-pond. The sport of trout-fishing among the mountains has an air of romance, tempting the inhabitant of the city to journey many miles for its enjoyment. Those who by instinct or education know how to handle the fly or the minnow; who can await with patience the reached out arm long in the same position for a "glorious nibble;" who can leap over log and stump, through bush and brake, angling at the turn of an eddy, the tail of a weed-bed, or at the foot of a noisy waterfall, and enjoy the sport with the gusto of Izaak Walton one hundred and fifty years ago; such as these know how to appreciate the pleasures of trout-fishing. The beauty and grandeur of scenery in Scotland or Switzerland, or any other country of Europe, cannot exceed that of the mountain region which I have been describing. What magnificent landscape will compare with the different views at the Notch; - with the Silver Cascade, half a mile from its entrance, issuing from the mountain eight hundred feet above the subjacent valley, passing over almost perpendicularly a series of rocks so little broken as to preserve the appearance of a uniform current, and yet so far disturbed as to be perfectly white; with the Flume, at no great distance, falling over three precipices from the height of two hundred and MOUNTAINS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. 75 fifty feet, down the two first in a single current, and over the last in three, uniting again at the bottom in a basin formed by the hand of Nature, perhaps by the wearing of the waters, in the rocks; with the impending rocks directly overhead on either side to a vast height rent asunder by that Power which first upheaved the mountains, leaving barely space for the head stream of the Saco and the road to pass; with the track of the awful avalanches at no great distance on either side, coming down from the height, throwing rocks, trees and earth across the defile, damming up the stream and forcing it to seek new channels, and covering up or carrying away clean to the surface of the hard rock the long travelled road! If the eye is not here sated with the grandeur and beauty of the stupendous works of the Almighty, and the changes he has wrought, let the traveller pass into the Franconia Notch, near the source of the Merrimack river, twenty miles southerly of the White Mountain Notch. The Man of the Mountain has long been personated and apostrophized: his covered head is the sure forerunner of the thunder shower or storm; and in the world of fiction he is made the main agent of the mountain genii, who bewilder and mislead the benighted traveller, and whose lodgement is in the rocky caverns hitherto unfrequented by the human tread. The Profile is perched at the height of more than a thousand feet the solid rock presents a side view or profile of the human face, every feature of which in the due proportion is conspicuous. It is no inanimate profile; it looks the living man, as if his voice could reach to the proportionate distance of its greater size. The Spirit of among the hills. Liberty dwells upon the mountains and "Scots who hae with Wallace bled Scots whom Bruce had often led." Look to Switzerland, to William Tell, to the Tyrolese, "Where the song of freedom soundeth ;" |