See! see!—the heavy morning mist, rising in huge volumes, reluctantly bares the forest on the mountain side,—it curls and breaks in vast masses,—it slowly rolls off to the eastward. Aye! there he stands—there stands old _Holyoke_, with his cragged coronal of rocks, a gigantic Titan, bidding defiance to time and tempest. Gallop—gallop! we are within two hundred feet of the summit. This precipice, its dark sides frowning and grim, the velvet moss, and little clustres of scarlet and yellow flowers peeping from its crevices, where the ripling brooklet scatters its mimic showers over them, wreathed fantastically with vines and gnarled branches from its clefts,—we must climb on foot. Rest a moment. How perfectly still the dense forest extends around us. Nought breaks the silence, save the querulous cry of the cat-bird, as it hops from branch to branch,—the mimic bark of the squirrel, or the distant hollow tap of the woodpecker. Now, a little more climbing—take care of those loose stones—a few steps additional ascent—give me your hand—spring!—here we are on the rocky platform of its summit. Is not the scene magnificent? We stand in the centre of an amphitheatre two hundred miles in diameter. See! at the base of the mountain curls, like a huge serpent, the Connecticut, its sinuosities cutting the smooth plains with all sorts of grotesque figures,—now making a circuit around a peninsula of miles, across whose neck a child might throw a stone,—here stretching straight as an arrow for a like distance,—and there again returning like a hare upon its course. See the verdant valleys extending around us, rich with the labour of good old New England’s sons, and far in the distance—the blue smoky distance—rising in majesty, God’s land-marks, the mountains. See the beautiful plains, the prairies beneath us, one great carpet of cultivation,—the fields of grain, the yellow wheat, the verdant maize, the flocks, the herds, the meadow, the woodland, forming beautiful and defined figures in its texture, while the villages in glistening whiteness, are scattered, like patches of snow, in every part of the landscape; and hark! in that indistinct and mellow music we hear the bell slowly tolling from yonder slender spire. Oh! for a Ruysdael, or a Rubens, to do justice to the picture.