the Notch. Before emerging from it, the rattling of wheels approached
behind us, and a stage-coach rumbled out of the mountain, with seats on
top and trunks behind, and a smart driver, in a drab greatcoat, touching
the wheel horses with the whipstock and reining in the leaders. To my
mind there was a sort of poetry in such an incident, hardly inferior
to what would have accompanied the painted array of an Indian war party
gliding forth from the same wild chasm. All the passengers, except a
very fat lady on the back seat, had alighted. One was a mineralogist,
a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy hammer,
with which he did great damage to the precipices, and put the fragments
in his pocket. Another was a well-dressed young man, who carried an
opera glass set in gold, and seemed to be making a quotation from some
of Byron's rhapsodies on mountain scenery. There was also a trader,
returning from Portland to the upper part of Vermont; and a fair young
girl, with a very faint bloom like one of those pale and delicate
flowers which sometimes occur among alpine cliffs.

They disappeared, and we followed them, passing through a deep pine
forest, which for some miles allowed us to see nothing but its own
dismal shade. Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,
surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out the sunshine
long before it left the external world. It was here that we obtained our
first view, except at a distance, of the principal group of mountains.
They are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a proper mood,
yet, by their breadth of base and the long ridges which support them,
give the idea of immense bulk rather than of towering height. Mount
Washington, indeed, looked near to heaven: he was white with snow a mile
downward, and had caught the only cloud that was sailing through the
atmosphere to veil his head. Let us forget the other names of American
statesmen that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the