There is this about mountains,--you cannot get away from them. Low country may be beautiful, yet you may be preoccupied and pass through it or by it without consciousness; but the mountains rise, and there is no escape. Representatives of an unseen force, voices from an infinite past, benefactors of the valleys, themselves unblest, almoners of a charity which leaves them in the heights indeed, but the heights of eternal desolation, raised above all sympathies, all tenderness, shining but repellent, grand and cold, mighty and motionless,--we stand before them hushed. They fix us with their immutability. They shroud us with their Egyptian gloom. They sadden. They awe. They overpower. Yet far off how different is the impression! Bright and beautiful, evanescent yet unchanging, lovely as a spirit with their clear, soft outlines and misty resplendence! Exquisitely says Winthrop: "There is nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain; even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness, that melting permanence, that evanescing changelessness. [I did not know that I was using his terms.] Clouds in vain strive to imitate it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can be blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid positiveness. Even in its cloudy, distant fairness, there is a concise, emphatic reality altogether uncloudlike." Seeing them from afar, lovely rather than terrible, we feel that though between 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.