wisdom, it is the Fourth! and you may well add your voice to swell
the choral honors of the time. How the tall old pines, withered by
the biting scathe of Eld, rise to the view, afar and near; white
shafts, bottomed in darkness, and standing like the serried spears
of an innumerable army! The groups around the beacon are gathered
together, but are forced to enlarge the circle of their
acquaintance, by the growing intensity of the increasing blaze.
Some of them, being ladies, their white robes waving in the
mountain breeze, and the light shining full upon them, present,
you observe, a beautiful appearance. The pale pillars of the
portico flash fitfully into view, now seen and gone, like columns
of mist. The swarthy African who kindled the fire regards it with
perspiring face and grinning ivories; and lo! the man who hath
mastered the quintupled glass of metamorphosed _eau-de-vie_,
standing by the towering pile of flame, and, reaching his hand on
high, he smiteth therewith his sinister pap, with a most hollow
sound; the knell, as it were of his departing reason. In short, he
is making an oration!

'Listen to those voiceful currents of air, traversing the vast
profound below the Platform! What a mighty circumference do they
sweep! Over how many towns, and dwellings, and streams, and
incommunicable woods! Murmurs of the dark, sources and awakeners
of sublime imagination, swell from afar. You have thoughts of
eternity and power here, which shall haunt you evermore. But we
must be early stirrers in the morning. Let us to bed.

* * * * *

'You can lie on your pillow at the Kaatskill House, and see the
god of day look upon you from behind the pinnacles of the White
Mountains in New Hampshire, hundreds of miles away. Noble
prospect! As the great orb heaves up in ineffable grandeur, he
seems rising from beneath you, and you fancy that you have
attained an elevation where may be seen _the motion of the world_.
No intervening land to limit the view, you seem suspended in
mid-air, without one obstacle to check the eye. The scene is
indescribable. The chequered and interminable vale, sprinkled with
groves, and lakes, and towns, and streams; the mountains afar off,
swelling tumultuously heavenward, like waves of the ocean, some
incarnadined with radi