The moment you are well awake, you find you are twice as good as new, and after breakfast, if you are sagacious, no one belonging to you will have any peace until you are striking out into the woods again,--the green, murmurous woods, tenanted by innumerable hosts of butterflies in their sunny outskirts, light-winged Psyches hovering in the warm, rich air, stained and spotted and splashed with every bright hue of yellow and scarlet and russet, set off against brilliant blacks and whites; dark, cool woods carpeted with mosses thick, soft, voluptuous with the silent tribute of ages, and in their luxurious depths your willing feet are cushioned,--more blessed than feet of Persian princess crushing her woven lilies and roses; the tender, sweet-scented woods lighted with bright wood-sorrel, and fragrant with dews and damps;--to the Garnet pool, perhaps, first, where the water has rounded out a basin in the rock, and with incessant whirls and eddies has hollowed numerous little sockets, smooth and regular, till you could fancy yourself looking upon the remains of a petrified, sprawling, and half-submerged monster. Where the water is still, it is beautifully colored and shadowed with the surrounding verdancy and flickering light and motion. If you have courage and a firm foothold, if you will not slip on wet rock, and do not mind you hands and knees in climbing up a dry one, if you can coil yourself around a tree that juts out over a path you wish to follow, you can reach points where the action of the water, violent and riotous, can be seen in all its reckless force. But, "Don't hold on by the trees," says Halicarnassus; "you will get your gloves pitchy." This to me, when I was in imminent danger of pitching myself incontinently over the rocks, and down into the whirlpools!
Glen Ellis Falls we found in a random saunter,--a wild, white water-leap, lithe, intent, determined, rousing you far off by the incessant roar of its battle-flood, only to burst upon you as aggressive, as unexpected and momentary, as if no bugle-peal had heralded its onset. Leaning against a tree that juts out over the precipice, clinging by its roots to the earth behind, and affording you only a problematical support, you look down upon a green, translucent pool, lying below rocks thickset with hardy shrubs and trees, up to the narrow fall that hurls itself down the cleft which it has grooved, concentrated and alert at first, then wavering out with little tremors into the scant sunshine, and meeting the waters beneath to rebound with many a spring of surge and spray. A strange freak of the water-nymphs it is that has fashioned this wild gulf and gorge, softened it with the waving of verdure, and inspirited it with the energy of eager waters.
Unsated we turn in again, thridding the resinous woods to track the shy Naiads hiding in their coverts. Over the brown spines of the pines, soft and perfumed, we loiter, following leisurely the faint warble of waters, till we come to the boiling rapids, where the stream comes hurrying down, and with sudden pique flies apart, on one side going to form the Ellis, on the other the Peabody River, and where in five minutes a stalwart arm could drain the one and double the other. Indeed, the existence of these two rivers seems to be a question of balance and coincidence and hairbreadth escapes. Our driver pointed out to us a tree whose root divides their currents. We pause but a moment on the crazy little bridge, and then climb along to the foot of the "Silver Cascade," farther and higher still, till we call see the little brook murmuring on its mountain way in the cliff above, and look over against it, and down upon it, as it streams through the rock, leaps adown the height, widening and thinning, spreading out over the face of the declivity, transmuting it into crystal, and veiling it with foam, leaping over in a hundred little arcs, lightly bounding to its basin below, then sweeping finely around the base of the projecting rock, and going on its way singing song of triumph and content. A gentle and beautiful Undine, the worshipping boughs bend to receive its benediction. Venturesome mosses make perpetual little incursions into its lapping tide, and divert numberless little streams to trickle around their darkness, and leap up again in silver jets, clapping their hands for joy.
"Now thanks to Heaven that of its grace Hath led me to this lonely place;Joy have I had, and going hence I bear away my recompense."All good and holy thoughts come to these solitudes. Here selfishness dies away, and purity and magnanimity expand, the essence and germ of life. Sitting here in these cool recesses, screened from the sun, moist and musical with the waters, crusts of worldliness and vanity cleave off from the soul.
