MOUNTAIN SCENERY.

:0:

The scenery of the North Carolina Appalachians is of a character peculiarly their own. It is infinitely varied, but its general aspects are those of soft loveliness, and the pleasing picturesque. This is due not only to the fertility of the soils and the dense tropical luxuriance of their forests and minor vegetation already alluded to, but also to the shape and outlines of their ridges and leading ranges. There are spots, it is true, where the sublime and the terrible prevail, which fill the soul with awe and absolute fear to gaze upon; spots where, as the geologists tell us, in the void of shapeless dawning of Creation, when the huge ribs of the hard, desolate earth were upheaved above the universal waters, that the dry land should appear, the imprisoned floods burst through their enclosing walls and swept away toward the primeval seas, tearing out in their fury the deep gorges with their sheer walls of granite, crowned with wild, rugged crags peering far into the blue Heavens. But the general aspect of the country is soft and pleasing. For the most part the mountains rise from the valleys with regular and measured swell, succeeding each other top over top, and peak after peak, like the less and the greater waves of the sea, whilst the valleys nestle between them with straight and even sweeps, or vary with graceful and witching curves which form the most delightful and picturesque outlines ever beheld. There is no sterility, there is little or no nakedness. The whole surface of the land, peak, glen, swelling ridge and mountain side, is clothed with an immortality of verdure which hides the ugliness of any scars in Nature's face.

a

I have never seen the great mountains of the world, and can only compare our highlands with them from imperfect book knowledge. It may even seem presumptuous to attempt to contrast them at all; but I well know that whilst there is a glory of the sun-which is perhaps the chief-there is also a glory of the moon and a glory of the stars, and that one star differeth from another star in glory. I can conceive the glory of the Alps and the Andes, their vast, inaccessible heights, cliff rising upon cliff, crag upon crag, reaching high into heaven like the stairways of the Almighty, until passing the limits of all life, everlasting snows crown their glowing summits, and present, when sparkling in the sun-beams under the deep sapphire vault which they seem almost to touch, spectacle to fill the soul forever. I know, too, that this majestic exhibition must chill by its very grandeur and fill the spectator with suggestions of nakedness, sterility, desolation and death. But the glory of the Appalachians, if humbler, is yet to my mind more charming and dearer to the heart than that of their grander young sister. The prospect from one of their tallest summits not only fills us with its sublimity and its inconceivable beauty, but it satisfies our souls with that nameless sense of pleasure which we ever derive from a contemplation of the goodness as well as the power of God. There is no chill, no suggestion of desolation in the vast sweep of mountain heights clothed in the very richest forest glory, and the soft-lying valleys, through whose bosoms a thousand thousand rushing streamlets leap and plunge toward the sea.

At every season of the year there is a charm about these splendid woodlands. Sometimes in mid-winter, a cloud laden with the sharp, ice-cold moisture of a January storm, drags. lazily against a sharp-pointed pinnacle where it hovers as a pall. It can scarcely be said to rain; its mosture seems gently to dissolve itself upon the earth and is immediately fixed by the cold. This gives rise to what is often termed

a frozen cloud. Every rock, tree, twig, and blade of grass upon that mountain top is instantly transformed into translucent silver. Now, if that mountain be due east of you, and if you will rise next morning in time to see the sun come forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, you will see a picture such as no man in this world has seen surpassed, and such as might have been in the mind of the vision-wrapped Apostle, when flitted before him the sublime semblace of the rainbow of emerald enclosing the throne of shining gold in the midst of the crystal sea! The storm has disappeared, the winds are mute, the heavens have assumed their deep, solemn azure. Sharppointed spears of golden fire come up from the east and dart among and through the translucent warp of that silver bridal veil which covers the moutain top with its ineffable glories. As the God of Day mounts higher and higher towards his throne, showers of shimmering radiance are scattered in whirling waves over the outstretched arms of the giant oaks and upon the emerald cones of the pines, leaping from branch to branch, until their rays meet and mingle in a crown of corruscating glory. And then in a maze of wonder and delight which is almost agony, you feel that you are gazing upon the Crystal Palace of God, whose splendors mortal man may be happy that he can see and live; and that ten thousand polished diamonds, the largest and the brightest that ever glittered in a monarch's diadem, would not compare with the glory which is made manifest in a single tree on that mountain top "wherewith it is clothed."

Let us look at another picture in this lovely land, of a softer and less dazzling beauty. A charming feature in these mountain ranges is the coves or glens scarped out of the sides of the ridges which enclose the valleys. Short, steep ribs rise from the brooks, and, running straight up, join the main ridge at right angles. Between these are the basin-shaped coves, down through the centers of which trickle branches of pure,

sweet water. The crests of these bisecting ridges and the main tops are usually covered with mountain pines, whilst the bosom of the cove, rich in the soils of disintegrating feldspar and hornblendeslates, is heavily laden with the noblest forest trees. Poplars, beeches, hickories, many kinds of the oak, chestnut, linn, buckeye, ash, maple, sour-wood, walnut, wild cherry, locust, wild cucumber, and many others, flourish and attain great size. Close along the border of the same stream, and tracing its meanders, runs a narrow ribbon of silver spruces, lifting their dark, rich, conical tops through the paler canopy of their deciduous neighbors like spearmen in battle array. Now, say we stand facing such a glen as this in the beautiful valley of the Swannanoa-as I have often done, and hope to do again—in the mellow mid-autumn season. A sharp, biting frost or so has already fallen, the decreasing days and the lengthening hours of the darkness have begun that mysterious chemical change in the vegetable world which we term decay, and which notifies the glory of the forest that it must die. But there is neither haste nor despair, nor any unseemliness in the dying of nature; and these children of the forest, as if in gratitude to their Creator for the magnificence which had been vouchsafed to them for a season, receive the summons gladly, and prepare to worship Him even in the splendor of their going out. Verily, it would seem as if they knew that resurgam was written on all things. Each puts on its funeral attire after his kind. The oaks and the beeches turn to a pale russet, the maples and sour-woods to a deep shining purple, the red oak to a pale yellow with iron-shot specks, the poplars, walnuts, ashes and locusts to the light gold of the hollyhock, and the wild cucumbers and the hickories put on the flaming gold of the sunflower. And so they "all do fade as a leaf," except the spruces and the mountain pines, which, like immortal spirits, die not. Oh, ye dwellers within cities and among the prosaic haunts of men, there is a scene which might

kindle your souls with a strange, inexplicable fire! Behold that wondrous sea of foliage spread over the landscape as a mantel; see that multitude of gorgeous colors, and consider the unspeakable splendors of their delicate intermingling, as they revel in the yellow beams of the setting sun, who smiles lovingly upon them and kisses his darlings good night! Verily, it would seem that such magnificence was the joint work of both the celestial and the terrestrial powers,

"As when some great painter dips

His brush in hues of earthquake and eclipse;"

and that some truant rainbow, based on either mountain, had bestridden the glen with its radiant arch, and whilst in the zenith of its glory had been smitten by a thunderbolt into small glowing dust, whose shining atoms had been scattered down upon the outstretched arms of the waiting forest! Nor are the great peaks, desolate crags and gaudy forests its chief attractions. Its minor vegetation is both rich and splendid, and flowers of every shape and hue and odor assist in the royal garnishment. I have seen a thousand acres of the diverse-colored azalia in one dense glowing parterre, whilst the air for miles of the journey was laden with the sweets of the calicanthus. But the most majestic of all our floral beauties is the purple rhododendron, which more nearly than any other in this clime, after the magnolia magniflora, approaches the gorgeousness of the tropics. Many of the sharp peaks of the Blue Ridge near Mount Mitchell are covered with them so densely as to give color to their entire summits. When the rhododrendons are in full bloom those peaks glow in the setting sun like pyramids of Tyrian purple relieved against the deep-enduring blue of Heaven.

The streams of the great number of which mention has been made-are also objects of unceasing beauty and interest. Like all mountain streams they are limpid and impetuous, and, owing to the density of the forests, of regular and unfail