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

[229] and mountains, from the top of North Hill. Newfound Lake in Hebron, only eight miles distant, you can't see; it lies too deep among the hills. Ponds show their small blue mirrors from various quarters of the great picture. Worthen's Mill-Pond and the Hardhack, where we used to fish for trout in truant, barefooted days, Blair's Mill-Pond, White Oak Pond, and Long Pond, and the Little Squam, a beautiful dark sheet of deep, blue water, about two miles long, stretched amid the green hills and woods, with a charming little beach at its eastern end, and without an island. And then the Great Squam, connected with it on the east by a short, narrow stream, the very queen of ponds, with its fleet of islands, surpassing in beauty all the foreign waters we have seen, in Scotland or elsewhere,—the islands covered with evergreens, which impart their hue to the mass of the lake, as it stretches seven miles on east from its smaller sister, towards the peerless Winnipesaukee. Great Squam is as beautiful as water and island can be. But Winnipesaukee, it is the very “ Smile of the Great Spirit.” It looks as if it had a thousand islands; some of them large enough for little towns, and others not bigger than a swan or a wild duck swimming on its surface of glass.

His wit and sarcasm were generally too good natured to provoke even their unfortunate objects, playing all over his editorials like the thunderless lightnings which quiver along the horizon of a night of summer calmness; but at times his indignation launched them like bolts from heaven. Take the following as a specimen. He is speaking of the