rable, than the first; then, leaping and
surging, it beats against its banks, and is hurled wrathfully back in
jets of spray and wreaths of foam; or, soothed into gentler mood by the
soft touch of mosses on the brown old rocks, it leaps lightly up their
dripping sides, and trickles back from the green, wet, overhanging
spray, and so, all passion sobbed away, it babbles down to its bed of
Lincoln green, where Robin Hood and Maid Marian wait under the oaken
boughs.

In the leaden, heavy air the scene was sombre,--tragic. In sunshine
and shadows it must have other moods, perhaps a different character; I
did not see the sunshine play upon it.

But the day of days you shall give to the mountain. The mountain,
Washington, king of all this Atlantic coast,--at least till but just
now, when some designing Warwick comes forward to press the claims of
an ignoble Carolinian upstart, with, of course, a due and formidable
array of feet and figures: but if they have such a mountain, where, I
should like to know, has he been all these years? A mountain is not a
thing that you can put away in your pocket, or hide under the eaves
till an accident reveals its whereabouts. Verily our misguided
brethren have much to do to make out a case; and, in the firm belief
that I am climbing up the highest point of land this side the Rocky
Mountains, I begin my journey.

Time was when the ascent of Mount Washington could be justly considered
a difficult and dangerous feat; but the Spirit of the Age who has many
worse things than this to answer for, has struck in and felled and
graded and curbed, till now one can ascend the mountain as safely as he
goes to market. I consider this road one of the greatest triumphs of
that heavily responsible spirit. Loquacious lovers of the "romantic"
lament the absence of danger and its excitements, and the road does
indeed lie open to that objection. He who in these latter days would
earn a reputation for enterprise--and I fancy the love of adventure to
be far less common than the love of being thought adventurous--must
have recourse to some such forlorn hope as going up the mountain on the
ice in midwinter, or coasting down on a hand-sled. But I have no
inclination in that direction. I am willing to encounter risks, if
there is no other way of attaining objects. But risks in and of
themselves are a nuisance. If there is no more excellent way, of
course you must clamber along steep, rugged stairways of