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MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
SKETCHES FROM MEMORY
THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.
It was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise from
Bartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extends
between mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often
as level as a church-aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we
had been loitering towards the heart of the White Mountains,--those
old crystal hills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our
distant wanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after
height had risen and towered one above another till the clouds began
to hang below the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of
the slides, those avalanches of earth, stones, and trees, which
descend into the hollows, leaving vestiges of their track hardly to
be effaced by the vegetation of ages. We had mountains behind us
and mountains on each side, and a group of mightier ones ahead.
Still our road went up along the Saco, right towards the centre of
that group, as if to climb above the clouds in its passage to the
farther region.
In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
Northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart
through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a
wondrous path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans,
was travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside
as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand
directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an
obstacle, but, rending it asunder a thousand feet from peak to base,
discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all
the secrets of the mountain's inmost heart, with a mighty fracture
of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White
Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean
an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of those symbolic scenes
which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not to the conception,
of Omnipotence.
. . . . .
We had now reached a narrow passage, which showed almost the
appearance of having been cut by human strength and artifice in the
solid rock. There was a wall of granite on each side, high and
precipitous, especially on our right, and so smooth that a few
evergreens could hardly find foothold enough to grow there. This is
the entrance, or, in the direction we were going, the extremity, of
the romantic defile of the Notch. Before emerging from it, the
rattling of wheels approached behind us, and a stage-coach rumbled
out of the mountain, with seats on top and trunks behind, and a
smart driver, in a drab great-coat, touching the wheel-horses with
the whip-stock and reigning in the leaders. To my mind there was a
sort of poetry in such an incident, hardly inferior to what would
have accompanied the painted array of an Indian war-party gliding
forth from the same wild chasm. All the passengers, except a very
fat lady on the back seat, had alighted. One was a mineralogist, a
scientific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy
hammer, with which he did great damage to the precipices, and put
the fragments in his pocket. Another was a well-dressed young man,
who carried an operaglass set in gold, and seemed to be making a
quotation from some of Byron's rhapsodies on mountain scenery.
There was also a trader, returning from Portland to the upper part
of Vermont; and a fair young girl, with a very faint bloom like one
of those pale and delicate flowers which sometimes occur among
alpine cliffs.
They disappeared, and we followed them, passing through a deep pine
forest, which for some miles allowed us to see nothing but its own
dismal shade. Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,
surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out the sunshine
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