with garlands and light sylph-like forms, which moisten their forests with soft dewy veils; whilst in the valley below, the little streams grow and sing, and trees and flowers waft over them their blessing as they speed along their course; and above all this the play of light and shadow; sunbeams in the water-falls which leap from the mountain; the mighty rock-visages, the little twittering birds—that is life!
The senseless rioting of man in the midst of this grandeur of nature makes me almost sad for my kindred. And yet when I was young I did not understand how to enjoy life and nature in any other way. The inclination was not wanting, but there was want of education, and amid all that noisy merriment a vacuity was felt.
People seek for the spiritual champagne, but they mistake what it is.
The true has the same relation to the ordinary that Bacchus Dithyrambus has to Silenus.
Yet there were also some true worshippers of the great goddess. One day we met a father and his little daughter. They had been botanising in the woods, and showed us several beautiful vacciniums, as well as a monotropa, which has merely one single flower, and is here called the Indian pipes. The father and daughter looked gentle and happy. It was a beautiful and perfect little picture.
Mrs. S. and I. are also of that class which silently receives the great spectacle into a thankful mind; now sitting beside the silver cascades for whole hours, now wandering on solitary rambles of discovery, among the romantic mountain gorges.
We have this afternoon rambled up to the Flume. This is a narrow chasm, between two lofty granite walls, through which a stream pours in almost a direct line upwards of eight hundred feet, when it falls in a cascade from a height of six hundred feet. Along the front of one of the rock-walls, our host, in true Yankee fashion,
