We have heard of Artists' brook in the Saco valley in New
England, but here every stream is clothed in exquisite tangles
of foliage and light. The pleasant reaches and graceful curves
through charming glens that are part in shadow and part in
light, what artist ever caught their subtile charm? Over the
rough boulders draped with moss and lichens we catch the mellow
gleam of light as it filters through the fluttering birch leaves
or falls upon the lovely gray bolls of aged beech trees. Then
they flow more slowly over some level stretch or stop to cool
themselves in the shadows of some graceful elms that rear their
green fountains of verdure above them. What joy it brings to you
as you sit musing by their sides, listening to their songs.
They all are excellent musicians, but we fear they are very poor
mathematicians, for how little they seem to know about straight
lines. But all are expert landscape gardeners, making graceful
loops and curves as they go meandering on their songful way. How
like a mountain road they are, "sinuous as a swallow's flight."
Often we have followed them as the sycamores and willows do,
drawn by an irresistible charm and found new and rare delight in
every turn. In places they rest in shady pools or pour their
wealth of sparkling waters over ledges of rocks or seek deep
coverts where tall ferns wave and the birch "dreams golden
dreams where no sunlight comes."
In regions as lovely as the highlands of New York, you are
reminded many times of that sweet singer who dwelt at Sunnyside,
and wrought the legends of these hills into the most exquisite
forms of beauty.
Out over the hills we beheld one of Nature's poems of twilight.
The vapors seemed to be gathering over the high ridges, but the
western sky was almost clear. It was evident that Nature was
preparing for a magnificent farewell today. Soon the west was
overrun with a golden flush that began to reveal a pink as
delicate as peach bloom and the vapors began to glow with
ineffable splendor.
As we watched the fantastic cloud-wreathed summits whose colors
were altogether indescribable, we noted the intensity of
coloring and rapid kaleidoscopic changes they underwent.
Suddenly a veil of mist would shut out the view for a time, then
grow luminous in the evening light, then fade; revealing new and
more glorious combinations of color until the clear outlines of
the mountains were etched against the sky. Again we asked
ourselves the perplexing question, which mountain scene is
loveliest? Before us rose visions of the airy forms of the Alps,
the beautiful and majestic wall of the Pyranees, the dark,
forbidding masses of the Eifel, and then the various ranges of
the Appalachians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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