ten minutes,--why, that is paradise itself as long
as it lasts."

One day I went down to the house of a settler a mile below, and
engaged the good dame to make us a couple of loaves of bread, and in
the evening we went down after them. How elastic and exhilarating
the walk was through the cool, transparent shadows! The sun was
gilding the mountains, and its yellow light seemed to be reflected
through all the woods. At one point we looked through and along a
valley of deep shadow upon a broad sweep of mountain quite near and
densely clothed with woods, flooded from base to summit by the
setting sun. It was a wild, memorable scene. What power and
effectiveness in Nature, I thought, and how rarely an artist
catches her touch! Looking down upon or squarely into a mountain
covered with a heavy growth of birch and maple, and shone upon by
the sun, is a sight peculiarly 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 mor