n, as I have often done at
other times, with a remark once made to me by a Vermont farmer's wife. I
had sought a night's lodging at her house, and during the evening we
fell into conversation about Mount Mansfield, from the top of which I
had just come, and directly at the base of which the farmhouse stood.
When she went up "the mounting," she said, she liked to look off, of
course; but somehow what she cared most about was "the mounting itself."

The woman had probably never read a line of Wordsworth, unless possibly,
"We are Seven" was in the old school reader; but I am sure the poet
would have liked this saying, especially as coming from such a source.
_I_ liked it, at any rate, and am seldom on a mountain-top without
recalling it. Her lot had been narrow and prosaic,--bitterly so, the
visitor was likely to think; she was little used to expressing herself,
and no doubt would have wondered what Mr. Pater could mean by his talk
about natural objects as possessing "more or less of a moral or
spiritual life," as "capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse."
From such refinements and subtleties her mind would have taken refuge in
thoughts of her baking and ironing. But she enjoyed the mountain; I
think she had some feeling for it, as for a friend; and who knows but
she, too, was one of "the poets that are sown by Nature"?

I spent two happy hours and a half at the summit of Lafayette. The
ancient peak must have had many a worthier guest, but it could never
have entertained one more hospitably. With what softly temperate breezes
did it fan me! I wish I were there now! But kind as was its welcome, it
did not urge me to remain. The word of the brook came true again,--as
Nature's words always do, if we hear them aright. Having gone as high as
my feet could carry me, there was nothing left but to go down again.
"Which things," as Paul said to the Galatians, "are an allegory."

I was not asked to stay, but I was invited to come again; and the next
season, also in June, I twice accepted the invitation. On the first of
these occasions, although I was eight days later than I had been the
year before (June 19th instead of June 11th), the diapensia was just
coming into somewhat free bloom, while the sandwort showed only here and
there a stray flower, and the geum was only in bud. The dwarf paper
birch (trees of no one knows what age, matting the ground) was in