ndit, soaring at his topmost height, must needs succumb to this sable
image of death. Nor are there wanting many smaller and less famous fowl,
who without contributing to the grandeur, yet greatly add to the beauty
of the scene. The yellow-bird flits like a winged jonquil here and
there; like knots of violets the blue-birds sport in clusters upon the
grass; while hurrying from the pasture to the grove, the red robin seems
an incendiary putting torch to the trees. Meanwhile the air is vocal
with their hymns, and your own soul joys in the general joy. Like a
stranger in an orchestra, you cannot help singing yourself when all
around you raise such hosannas.

But in autumn, those gay northerners, the birds, return to their
southern plantations. The mountains are left bleak and sere. Solitude
settles down upon them in drizzling mists. The traveller is beset, at
perilous turns, by dense masses of fog. He emerges for a moment into
more penetrable air; and passing some gray, abandoned house, sees the
lofty vapors plainly eddy by its desolate door; just as from the plain
you may see it eddy by the pinnacles of distant and lonely heights. Or,
dismounting from his frightened horse, he leads him down some scowling
glen, where the road steeply dips among grim rocks, only to rise as
abruptly again; and as he warily picks his way, uneasy at the menacing
scene, he sees some ghost-like object looming through the mist at the
roadside; and wending towards it, beholds a rude white stone, uncouthly
inscribed, marking the spot where, some fifty or sixty years ago, some
farmer was upset in his wood-sled, and perished beneath the load.

In winter this region is blocked up with snow. Inaccessible and
impassable, those wild, unfrequented roads, which in August are
overgrown with high grass, in December are drifted to the arm-pit with
the white fleece from the sky. As if an ocean rolled between man and
man, intercommunication is often suspended for weeks and weeks.

Such, at this day, is the country which gave birth to our hero:
prophetically styled Israel by the good Puritans, his parents, since,
for more than forty years, poor Potter wandered in the wild wilderness
of the world's extremest hardships and ills.

How little he thought, when, as a boy, hunting after his father's stray
cattle among these New England hills he himself like a beast should be
hunted through half of Old England, as a runaway rebel. Or, how could he
ever have dreamed,