he sunken meadow of a river; a farther wood,
that skirts a town,--that seems to overgrow the town, so that only a
confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise above the wood;
and these tallest spires and turrets lying in relief against a purple
hill-side, that is as far beyond the town as the town is beyond my
window; and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake-like gleam
of water, where a light-house shines upon a point; and northward, as I
said, these same purple hills bearing away to paler purple, and then to
blue, and then to haze.

Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward; but by an oblique
glance southward (always from my library-window) the checkered farm-land
is repeated in long perspective: here and there is a farm-house with
its clustered out-buildings; here and there a blotch of wood, or of
orcharding; here and there a bright sheen of winter-grain; and the level
ends only where a slight fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a
railway that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, separate it
from Long Island Sound.

To the north, under such oblique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands
in smaller inclosures stretch half a mile to the skirts of a quiet
village. A few tall chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see
as many quick and repeated puffs of white steam. Two white spires and
a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at
whose foot the village seems to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly
precipitous; for the columnar masses been fretted away by a thousand
frosts, making a sloping _debris_ below, and leaving above the
iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the
still older stain of lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with
dwarf cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either flank, mingle
with a heavier growth of hickories and chest-nuts. A few stunted kalmias
and hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of
the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars,
lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset
light richly and changefully as the breast of a dove.

But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still. Indeed, I do not
know why I should have described at such length a mere landscape, (than
which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is always
in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders