r four days when you perceive it is a thought
less bright. Why is it that no painting of our autumnal foliage has
succeeded? It has been as faithfully imitated as the colors on the
pallet can copy these living, glowing colors; but those who have best
succeeded--even Cole, with his accurate eye, and faithful, beautiful
art--have but failed. The pictures, if toned down, are dull; if up to
nature, are garish to repulsiveness. Is it not that nature's toning is
inimitable, and that the broad overhanging firmament with its cold,
serene blue, and the soft green of the herbage, and brown of the reaped
harvest-fields, temper to the eye the intervening brilliancy, and that,
within the limits of a picture, there is not sufficient expanse to
reproduce these harmonies?

* * * * *

_Saturday Evening._--We have driven some twenty-three miles--from the
Mountain Notch to the Franconian Notch--to-day; the weather has been
delicious. The drive has been more prosaic, more commonplace, or
approaching to it, than we have before traveled in this hill country.
This October coloring would make far tamer scenery beautiful, but I can
fancy it very bleak and dismal when 'blow, blow November's winds,'
whereas here, at the Franconian Notch, you feel as it were housed and
secured by nature's vast fortresses and defences. The 'Eagle's Cliff' is
on one side of you, and Mount Cannon (called so from a resemblance of a
rock on the summit to a cannon) on the other, and they so closely fold
and wall you in, that you need but a poetic stretch of the arms to touch
them with either hand; and when the sun glides over the arch in the
zenith above--but a four hours' visible course in mid-winter--you might
fancy yourself sheltered from the sin and sorrow that great Eye
witnesseth.

You will accuse me, I know, dear, rational friend, of being '_exalte_,'
(vernacular, cracked,) but remember, we are alone in these inspiring
solitudes, free from the disenchantment of the eternal buzzing and
swarming of the summer-troops that the North gives up, and the South
keeps not back.

We were received at the Profile House with a most smiling welcome by Mr.
Weeks, the _pro tem._ host, who promises to make us 'as comfortable as
is in his power,' and is substantiating his promise by transferring his
dinner-table from the long, uncarpeted dinner-saloon with its fearful
rows of bare chairs and tables, to a well-furnished, home-looking
apartment, wh