Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[302] miles of bare, pure mountain-top, of pastures scented with sweet-fern, of lanes hedged with raspberry bushes and arched with wild grape, of moist sphagnum meadows where the shy arethusa rears itself, that breath has come. Before, all was city and suburb; it is country now. The next turn in the road shows you Wachusett, or Monadnock, or Ascutney, and you are among the hills.

The reprobate French poet Baudelaire, in one of his best poems, sighs to have been the lover of some youthful giantess; and describes her superb proportions as cast carelessly along the horizon and protecting her lover by their vast shade. Browning, more powerfully, describes the hills as gathering round his Childe Roland to watch the hour of danger beneath the Dark Tower:

The dying sunset kindled through a cleft;
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay-
“Now stab and end the creature — to the heft!”

And even the gentle Charles Lamb, reluctantly torn from London streets to visit Wordsworth and Coleridge at the English Lakes, could not escape this same circle of gigantic figures, and found them protecting and kindly as he looked from his window at night: “Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc.” There is so much that is personal in the