his view all men were equal. Priests, stripped of their
sacerdotal tailoring, were in his view but men, after all. He pitied
them, he said, for they were in a wrong position,--above life's comforts
and sympathies,--"up in the unnatural cold, they had better come down
among men, and endure and enjoy with them." "Mankind," said he, "want
the healing influences of humanity. They must love one another more.
Disinterested good will make the world as it should be."

His last visit to his native valley was in the autumn of 1845. In a
familiar letter to a friend, he thus describes his farewell view of the
mountain glories of his childhood's home:--

"I went a jaunt, Thursday last, about twenty miles north of this valley,
into the mountain region, where what I beheld, if I could tell it as I
saw it, would make your outlawed sheet sought after wherever our Anglo-
Saxon tongue is spoken in the wide world. I have been many a time among
those Alps, and never without a kindling of wildest enthusiasm in my
woodland blood. But I never saw them till last Thursday. They never
loomed distinctly to my eye before, and the sun never shone on them from
heaven till then. They were so near me, I could seem to hear the voice
of their cataracts, as I could count their great slides, streaming adown
their lone and desolate sides,--old slides, some of them overgrown with
young woods, like half-healed scars on the breast of a giant. The great
rains had clothed the valleys of the upper Pemigewasset in the darkest
and deepest green. The meadows were richer and more glorious in their
thick 'fall feed' than Queen Anne's Garden, as I saw it from the windows
of Windsor Castle. And the dark hemlock and hackmatack woods were yet
darker after the wet season, as they lay, in a hundred wildernesses, in
the mighty recesses of the mountains. But the peaks,--the eternal, the
solitary, the beautiful, the glorious and dear mountain peaks, my own
Moosehillock and my native Haystacks,--these were the things on which eye
and heart gazed and lingered, and I seemed to see them for the last time.
It was on my way back that I halted and turned to look at them from a
high point on the Thornton road. It was about four in the afternoon. It
had rained among the hills about the Notch, and cleared off. The sun,
there sombred at that early hour, as towards his setting, was pouring his
most glorious light upon the naked peaks, and they casting their mighty
shadows