, roaring through the culvert, tumbles unwarily down the
precipice before it knows what it is about.

I have heard it said, that the man who originated this road has since
become insane. More likely he was insane at the time. Surely, no man
in his senses would ever have projected a scheme so wild and
chimerical, so evidently impossible of fulfilment. Projected it was,
however, not only in fancy, but in fact, to our great content; and so,
tamely but comfortably, an untiring cavalcade, we leave the peaceful
glen set at the mountain's base, and wind through the lovely, lively
woods, tremulous with sunshine and shadows, musical with the manifold
songs of its pregnant solitudes, out from the woods, up from the woods,
into the wild, cold, shrieking winds among the blenched rocks and the
pale ghosts of dead forests stiff and stark, up and up among the
caverns, and the gorges, and the dreadful chasms, piny ravines black
and bottomless, steeps bare and rocky leading down to awful depths; on
and on, fighting with maddened winds and the startled, wrathful
wraiths, onward and upward till we stand on the bleak and shivering,
the stony and soulless summit.

Desolation of desolations! Desolation of desolations! How terrible is
this place! The shining mountain that flashed back to the sun his
radiance is become a bald and frowning desert that appalls us with its
barrenness. The sweet and sylvan approach gave no sign of such a goal,
but the war between life and death was even then begun. The slant
sunlight glinted through the jungle and bathed us with its glory of
golden-green. The shining boles of the silvery gray birch shot up
straight, and the white birch unrolled its patches of dead pallor in
the sombre, untrodden depths. The spruces quivered like pure jellies
tipped with light, sunshine prisoned in every green crystal.
Myrtle-vines ran along the ground, the bunch-berry hung out its white
banner, and you scarcely saw the trees that lay faint and fallen in the
arms of their mates. The damp, soft earth nourished its numerous brood,
Terrae omni parentis alumnos, its own thirsty soul continually
refreshed from springs whose sparkle we could not see, though the
gurgle and ripple of their march sung out from so many hiding-places
that we seemed to be

"Seated in hearing of a hundred streams."

Whole settlements of the slender, stately brakes filled the openings,
and the mountain-ash drooped in graceful curves over our heads,