Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/67

Rh And Scott tells of his experience here, in the well-known poem beginning

though its brow is whiter than a blonde Caucasian's; and Sheridan Knowles makes Tell say,

Emerson's "Monadnock" and Lowell's "Katahdin" are misprints for this splendor of a mountain. Surely English poetry is full of this name. Strange that one never saw it before.

It is worthy of its fame, for in this hollow among the hills it puts on especial majesty. You are well up to its base. The distant ocean and sea - port view is exchanged for one near at hand. Though still sixty miles away, it seems to rise at your very feet. How superbly it lifts its shining cone into the shining heavens! Clouds had lingered about it on our way hither, touching now its top, now swinging round its sides. But here they are burned up, and only this pinnacle of ice shoots up fourteen thousand feet before your amazed, uplifted eyes. Mont Blanc, at Chamouni, has no such solitariness of position, nor rounded perfection, nor rich surroundings. Every thing conspires to give this the chief place among the hills of earth. None these eyes have seen equals or approaches it in every feature. It will yet win the crowd from Europe to its grander shrine.

It is not difficult of ascent, in this being inferior to Europe's Mont Blanc, if that be an inferiority which makes its summit and the view therefrom accessible to ordinary daring.

The three Mexican volcanoes have been often under foot, though not till Cortez came was this achievement known. His men, in the exuberance of their superiority, scaled the peaks near the city, and astonished the natives by their feat. They brought back sulphur from the crater for the manufacture of powder, thus bringing the fatal mountain in more deathly shape home to the poor Aztec.