A mile or two more, and there was a space clear from trees on the left. As the coach swept up to it the mists seemed to shrink low for a moment. A heavy, dark line loomed on the sky, with almost the true sweep of a wide Gothic arch, a little sharpened at the top. "How graceful!" was the exclamation of one. "How high!--look!--why that is higher than any of the others that we have seen!" exclaimed a second. "Mount Washington," calmly said a habitue who caught a glimpse through the curtain from the back corner of the coach; and every voice joined in the cry. The habitue was right--cloud and mist had rolled away for an instant, just at the opportune moment, and they had caught that magnificent first near view of the monarch, throned amid his clouds, glorious in the grace of form and the awe of majesty--seeming to bridge the very space between earth and heaven! Some of those favored gazers will dream of that first glance, years hence, when they have been straining the mental vision upward, in waking hours, to that unattainable and dim which rises above the mists of common life. Some of them will throne the great mountain in their hearts, and stretch out pleading arms to it in remembrance, in the dark days of shame and sorrow,--as if the treading of their feet upon its rocky pinnacle would be indeed an escape from the world--as if they might become sharers, indeed, in the majesty of its great solitude. Some of the travellers felt the solemnity of the hour and the scene, that day; and there was not even a sneer or a word of misappreciation for the adventurous genius who quoted, heedless of all that made it inappropriate: "Mount Blanc is the monarch of mountains: They crowned him long ago, On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a diadem of snow!" There was a brief ride remaining, then, till they rolled in over a level road, through thick overhanging woods, to the Crawford House in the White Mountain Notch. The mist had closed almost hopelessly down for the time, and they could only see occasional glimmers through it of the rough sides of old Mount Webster, dark-browed and massive as its namesake. It was only in the brighter air of morning that they were to take in the whole location and see in front, to the right, Mount Willard, wooded on the side exposed to view, but bald and rugged farther down the Notch, like the Cannon at Franconia; with Mount Jackson to the left in front, beyond it the still higher peaks of Mount Webster, and rising at the left in the immediate foreground the long wooded slopes of Mount Clinton, over which the foot of every pilgrim to Mount Washington from the Crawford must make its first ascent.