agreeable to me. How
closely the swelling umbrageous heads of the trees fit together, and
how the eye revels in the flowing and easy uniformity, while the mind
feels the ruggedness and terrible power beneath!

As we came back, the light yet lingered on the top of Slide Mountain.

"'The last that parleys with the setting sun,'"

said I, quoting Wordsworth.

"That line is almost Shakespearean," said my companion. "It suggests
that great hand at least, though it has not the grit and virility of
the more primitive bard. What triumph and fresh morning power in
Shakespeare's lines that will occur to us at sunrise to-morrow!--

"'And jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops."

Or in this:--

"'Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.'

There is savage, perennial beauty there, the quality that Wordsworth
and nearly all the modern poets lack."

"But Wordsworth is the poet of the mountains," said I, "and of lonely
peaks. True, he does not express the power and aboriginal grace there
is in them, nor toy with them and pluck them up by the hair of their
heads, as Shakespeare does. There is something in Peakamoose yonder, as
we see it from this point, cutting the blue vault with its dark,
serrated edge, not in the bard of Grasmere; but he expresses the
feeling of loneliness and insignificance that the cultivated man has in
the presence of mountains, and the burden of solemn emotion they give
rise to. Then there is something much more wild and merciless, much
more remote from human interests and ends, in our long, high, wooded
ranges than is expressed by the peaks and scarred groups of the lake
country of Britain. These mountains we behold and cross are not
picturesque,--they are wild and inhuman as the sea. In them you are in
a maze, in a weltering world of woods; you can see neither the earth
nor the sky, but a confusion of the growth and decay of centuries, and
must traverse them by your compass or your science of woodcraft,--a
rift through the trees giving one a glimpse of the opposite range or of
the valley beneath, and he is more at sea than ever; one does not know
his own farm or settlement when framed in these mountain treetops; all
look alike unfamiliar."

Not the least of the charm of camping out is your camp-fire at night.
What an artist! What pictures are boldly thrown or faintly outlined
upon the canvas of the night! Every obj