protruded from the parent stem, till each species of plant appeared as if it had been suddenly arrested and transmuted to crystal in all the carelessness of pastime, in which, an instant before, it had moved to the breathing of the air. Nothing was rendered in the slightest degree indistinct, no branches were crushed together or iced in masses, but all was defined and ramified with as much clearness and minuteness of beauty, as if the crystal vegetation had sprung by magic from the ground. Every blade of grass presented its upright posture and supported its feathery top, though loaded with accumulations of ice upon all the little clusters of its hayseed, which had ripened in the autumn sun and remained to dry and wither in the winter wind. The earth thus seemed as if it were covered a foot thick over its whole surface with every variety of the most costly and splendid gems. The foot stepped and slipped amidst them with a confused ringing sound, and while tramping carelessly through the glittering profusion, one might have imagined himself wandering with Sindbad the sailor over the valley of diamonds, and with the same indifference of feeling which he manifested as to their value. From an elevated position I gazed upon the expanse immediately before me. It was an immense carpet of studded and sparkling jewelry, traversed and divided at right angles by two broad paths of smooth and polished steel, which glistened fiercely in the dancing sunbeams. The trees, the most beautiful feature in this vision of glory, rose out of the earth like fairy exhibitions. They seemed, in their graceful forms and glorious foliage, fit resting places for the birds of paradise. They reminded me of the enchanted garden in Aladdin's cave, where the trees, with golden or silver trunks and branches, were loaded for fruit with precious stones of every size, quality and lustre. They looked, with their bending and richly jewelled boughs, flaming in the sun's rays, like immense silver or glass chandeliers, self-burning and suspended by magic from the vaulted sky. The weight upon them was so enormous that the thickest trunks and the strongest and most guarded branches bent beneath its power. The boughs were all opened from the trunk and inclined outwards and downwards to the earth, presenting, instead of their usual erect and close posture, a wider expanse of jewelled foliage, and of course a more soft and undulating picture. The branches of the elms especially hung over around the trunk in rich festoons arched with indescribable grace and beauty. Hogarth's idea of this latter quality was most perfectly illustrated. There were no straight lines or angular points, but all was waving, rounded, and gracefully bent. The various sorts of trees displayed a difference in their appearance corresponding to the difference in their natural colour and form. The evergreens exhibited a kind of gloomy, grey, leaden lustre, produced by the dark hue of the verdure seen through the covering of ice. The pine presented a singular picture. Every spear of its verdure found a separate projection of ice, and every tuft a separate tuft of shaggy crystal, and each tree looked like a huge mass of mosses clustered together, and dipped in liquid silver. The effect of the incrustation on the massed groves and forests was such as no power of description can delineate. We stood before an indefinite extent of woods of pure transparent ice on which the sun streamed down his rays, flashing through an atmosphere of intense cold and sparkling clearness, to be reflected back in ten thousand prismatic and changing hues, and the crushing murmur, as the wind swept over the forest and waved and agitated its mighty depths sounded like the distant and fitful roar of ocean. The whole country, observed at once from any elevated point of view while under this transformation, was glorious beyond utterance. It lay beneath the eye, a world of transparent gems, blazing with the light thrown on it in showers through an atmosphere of excessive purity and brilliance. We gazed upon a perfect fairy land, glittering with supernatural effulgence, its air fanned by the white wings of etherial spirits, its luxuriant crystal vegetation and its bowers of metallic foliage the scenes of their principal sports and revelries. The earth seemed one vast ocean of inspissated light, lashed into foam over its whole surface, its white spray dancing in the air, its crusted waves here and there whirled and columned into a water-spout, and springing upwards, a magnificent torrent of sparkling drops, to flame for one moment in its agitated splendor, and again to fall upon the bosom of the deep. The world before us was so gloriously bright, so unearthly and resplendent in its beauty, that the eye could not detect the visible horizon; the line of separation at times was absolutely lost, earth mingled with heaven, nor was it possible to perceive where the radiant outline of the one melted into the white cloud and the pure azure of the other. We looked forward to the shining land of Beulah, and it seemed as if we had only to travel onward a short distance, ascending through its sacred precincts, to arrive at the heavenly Jerusalem beyond. The clouds which wore the soft and gorgeous mantle of summer, converted by the sunbeams into rolling volumes of fleecy brilliance, mingled and melted away at the horizon into forests and mountains, that shone almost with a brighter effulgence. The morning rays fell upon this scene with unutterable glory. Its splendor continued to increase till the sun reached the meridian, and then his beams descending more nearly vertical upon the gem-clad hills and plains and forests, rendered the light, as it lay upon the crystal drapery and the starry fretwork, almost intolerable. Then his rays gradually dropped into a horizontal direction, till he parted from a world apparently on fire with his glory, and set behind the jewel crested mountains, amidst the wide sea of purple, rosy and golden hues, in which the clouds, the mountain tops, the forests, the whole hemisphere, seemed to be bathed and melted and floating away in soft and indistinct forms of mellow magnificence. Then evening came to give the scene the tinge and character of its own delicate and silent beauty. The stars danced and quivered awhile in restless flashes in the cold, blue depths, but the moon soon rode high in the heavens "sole regent of the night," and shone mildly upon the few light clouds that now sailed slowly over the sky, and dropped her quiet, silver paleness of lustre on the landscape beneath, so gemmed, that it seemed to vie with the universe above in the beauty of its jewelry. The elms, with their boughs so gracefully arched and festooned by the heavy and thickly-studded crystals, now stood in the moon-beams, like jets d'eau of liquid diamond, springing in perpetual fulness from the earth, and suddenly arrested and suspended, motionless in the atmosphere, by some mighty, instantaneous spell, in the very act of falling again into its bosom. There they stood, forms of such exceeding loveliness, that the mind could hardly persuade itself that appearances so celestial, so ravishing to the sight, could be any thing more than momentary phantoms, deceitful illusions of the imagination, too brilliant not to pass away like a wreath of white shadowy vapour. Yet there they stood, and the eye was never wearied with gazing on them in their calm, sleeping, perfect beauty, bathed in the clear, soft, still moonlight, that lay upon them like a mantle of fresh dew over the foliage of summer. If you looked through one of them at the blue heaven, your eye seemed to have just lighted for the first time on a vast cluster of stars, that had newly sprung into existence together, to fill a vacant spot in the vault of the universe. In proportion as they receded from the vision these objects became more indistinct and mingled in their beauty, trees melted into forests of grey light, and forests melted away in pale, and silvery, and misty obscurity, and the eye gradually passed to enjoy the quiet repose in the undulating swell of the varied horizon, and to dwell long on the dim and sombre magnificence in the faint outline of the far, far distant mountains. Towards the close of an afternoon in one of the cold, sparkling days, during which this glorious scene remained to us, I climbed to the summit of Mount Prospect, (an expressive though not a classical name,) and there waited till sunset. It was with some labor that I reached the highest elevation, but the sublime pleasure I experienced would have almost repaid me even for a journey to the summit of Mont Blanc. The scene which ensued is beyond the power of any earthly dialect, or the utmost portraiture of earthly colors to delineate. If the genius of Salvator and Claude were combined and harmonized in the bosom of one man, it would quail under the attempt to throw upon the canvass such gorgeous, such unequalled magnificence. My situation enabled me to command a circumference of prospect so unbounded that the vision could hardly travel to its uttermost extent. From around the foot of the elevated hill, on the summit of which I stood, arose, with a gradual and beautiful ascent, an immense amphitheatre of hill and dale, woodland and open plain, dotted with farmhouses and villages, and covered thick with the icy and transparent incrustation, which lay upon the face of all nature beneath the light of heaven, like a pellucid veil, woven continuous from an infinite quantity of gems of all brilliant colors and costly water. Terrace after terrace, clothed in this magnificent robe of variegated lustre ascended and melted away in a still loftier and wider and more grand and distant swell, till they seemed piled into the very heavens; and mountain rose far behind mountain and faded into indistinct shapes of grey, undulating vapor, till at last the whole grand outline imperceptibly mingled with the clouds. Behind me to the east stretched a long line of gentle declivities, whose summits and western sides seemed all on fire in the splendor of the evening sun, affording a fine contrast with the gloom of the valley and forest here and there interspersed between them, and now and then completely enveloped in the rapidly descending and changing shadows. Far beyond lay the bay of Salem, distinguishable only as a narrow strip, almost a thread of light, betwixt the broken and waving outline of the land at either end and before it. Imagination carried the vision still farther forth, till I could view the tumultuous sea in its restless agitation, and the white sails flitting over the bosom of the mighty waters. Around the whole of this almost limitless landscape, the eye roved bewildered with its beauty, and the mind, enrapt with adiniration, knew not where to stay or how to marshal the multitude of its thick-coming fancies. Here the vision rested on an interminable forest of evergreen, whose dark hue struggled through the brilliance with which it was invested, producing a beautiful contrast, in its rich sombre magnificence, to the fantastic splendor around it. There it fell upon an open meadow or a vast field of tufted bushes and brakes, that looked like a flood of material light, whose surface was agitated all over by some invisible commotion, into one bright cloud of dewy spray, dashed into the air and glittering in the sunbeams, a perpetual sheet of white, crisped, dazzling foam. Now it glanced over the broad roof of some solitary farmhouse, burnished like a plate of steel, or over a cluster of buildings flaming in the sun's fiery rays, like palaces of solid phosphorus. Again the eye would commence its gaze at the foot of the elevation, on the summit of which it seemed the centre of the whole scene, and ascend gradually from point to point in the sublime amphithea tre, till it passed the earth's horizon, and was lost insensibly in the depths of heaven's azure, or the bosom of the snowy clouds. 6 The interchange of light and shade upon the landscape as the flying clouds now hid and now revealed the sun,' was wonderfully picturesque. The delighted eye followed the shadows as they slowly sailed over the scene, chased in immediate pursuit by the sunbeams, and successively throwing their dark veil to sadden the glitter of hill and dale, woodland and meadow, village and forest. Again, enveloped, itself, in the gloom, the eye looked forth where the sun at a distance broke from the vapor, and poured down through the cold, clear atmosphere a shower of radiance strongly contrasted, on the earth's crystal surface, with the confused masses of shade which were flying before it. Here and there also, as the sun levelled his rays more horizontally across the hemisphere, a towering hillock, itself floating in light, cast a long, dim shadow over the space behind it, and again in its own turn became darkened by the intervening form of some fire-crested peak in its front. Over all this expanse of earthly glory the vault of heaven spread out its sublime arch, arrayed in a gorgeous drapery of clouds and a richness and variety of coloring, such as I have seldom witnessed. The clouds hung in the pure ether, combining the fleecy, fanciful shapes of summer softness and profusion, with the wild characteristics of wintry majesty and grandeur. Their forms were perpetually changing; now a wild, mountainous crag melted into a soft and delicate undulation, and again a rolling volume of snowy down broke into dark, threatening masses of heavy and ragged magnificence. Their coloring changed as often as their forms. Now they floated in gold and shone like an army of angels; now they seemed dipped in purple, which the next moment deepened into crimson, and now they rolled outwards in white, silvery masses, and again changed before the eye in all the colors of the rainbow. And now, as it drew towards the mellow moment of sunset, they began to be tinged with dyes of unutterable richness and beauty. 'Hues that have words, and speak to you of heaven,' spread themselves fast and full over all the western horizon. The clear sky towards its verge, which presented, a few moments before, a most brilliant gold, now looked an infinite flood of liquid carmine, through which the clouds floated soft and slow like islands of the blest. As they lay there, receding and diminishing behind each other in regular perspective, so distant, so silent, and in such deep and tranquil repose, they seemed a visible symbol of infinity, and impressed upon the mind a forcible idea of the limitless, the eternal. In the presence of such a scene, "Our noisy years seem moments in the being |