n the mountain and its valley, with much friendly service and
continual intercourse, there can be no real communion, still the
mountain is not utterly lonely, but has yonder in the east its solace,
and in the north a companion, and over toward the west its coterie.
Solitary but to the lowly-living, in its own sphere there is immortal
companionship, and this vast hall of the heavens, and many a draught of
nectar borne by young Ganymede.

The Alpine House seems to be the natural caravansary for Grand Trunk
travellers, being accessible from the station without the intervention
of so much as an omnibus, and being also within easy reach of many
objects of interest. Here, therefore, we lay over awhile to strike out
across the mountains and into the valleys, and to gather health and
serenity for the weeks that were to come, with their urgent claims for
all of both that could be commanded.

Eastern Massachusetts is a very pretty place to live in, and the mutual
admiration society is universally agreed by its members to be the very
best society on this continent. Nevertheless, by too long and close
adherence to that quarter of the globe, one comes to forget how the
world was made, and, in fact, that it ever was made. We silently take
it for granted. It was always there. Smooth, smiling plains, gentle
hills, verdurous slopes, blue, calm streams, and softly wooded
banks,--a courteous, well-bred earth it is, and we forget that it has
not been so from the beginning. But here among the mountains, Genesis
finds exegesis. We stand amid the primeval convulsions of matter,--the
first fierce throes of life. Marks of the struggle still linger; nay,
the struggle itself is not soothed quite away. No more unexceptionable
surfaces, but yawns and fissures, chasms and precipices, deep gashes in
the hills, hills bursting up from the plains, rocks torn from their
granite beds and tossed hither and thither in some grand storm of Titan
wrath, rivers with no equal majesty, but narrow, deep, elfish, rising
and falling in wild caprice, playing mad pranks with their uncertain
shores, treacherous, reckless, obstreperous. Here we see the changes
actually going on. The earth is still a-making. More than one river,
scorning its channel, has, within the memory of man, hewn out for
itself another, and taken undisputed, if not undisturbed possession.
The Peabody River, which rolls modestly enough now, seeming, indeed, a
mere thread of brook dancing