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 through a rocky bed by far too large for it, will by and by, when the rains come, rise and roar and rush with such impetuosity that these great water-worn stones, now bleaching quietly in the sun, shall be wrenched up from their resting-places, and whirled down the river with such fury and uproar that the noise of their crashing and rolling shall break in upon your dreams at night. Wild River, a little farther down, you may ford almost dry-shod, and in four hours it shall reach such heights and depths as might upbear our mightiest man-of-war. Many and many a gully, half choked with stones and briers, lurks under the base of an overtopping hill, and shows where a forgotten Undine lived and loved. The hills still bear the scars of their wounds. No soft-springing greenness veils the tortuous processes. Uncompromising and terrible, the marks of their awful rending, the agony of their fiery birth, shall remain. Time, the destroyer of man's works, is the perfecter of God's. These ravages are not Time's; they are the doings of an early force, beneficent, but dreadful. It is Time's to soothe and adorn.