The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

[223] Faneuil Hall; but she will be found wailing, like Jephthah's daughter, among the “hollows” and along the sides of the Green Mountains.

Vermont shows gloriously at this autumn season. Frost has gently laid hands on her exuberant vegetation, tinging her rock-maple woods without abating the deep verdure of her herbage. Everywhere along her peopled hollows and her bold hillslopes and summits the earth is alive with green, while her endless hard-wood forests are uniformed with all the hues of early fall, richer than the regimentals of the kings that glittered in the train of Napoleon on the confines of Poland, when he lingered there, on the last outposts of summer, before plunging into the snow-drifts of the North; more gorgeous than the array of Saladin's life-guard in the wars of the Crusaders, or of “ Solomon in all his glory,” decked in all colors and hues, but still the hues of life. Vegetation touched, but not dead, or, if killed, not bereft yet of “signs of life.” “ Decay's effacing fingers' had not yet ” swept the hills' “ where beauty lingers.” All looked fresh as growing foliage. Vermont frosts don't seem to be “killing frosts.” They only change aspects of beauty. The mountain pastures, verdant to the peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steep hills, were covered with the amplest feed, and clothed with countless sheep; the hay-fields heavy with second crop, in some partly cut and abandoned, as if in very weariness and satiety, blooming with honeysuckle, contrasting strangely with the colors on the woods; the fat cattle and the long-tailed colts and closebuilt Morgans wallowing in it up to the eyes, or the