Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/129

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 121

whole route of eight miles up the mountain. I have now- mounted it from both sides, and think it less interesting than most of its neighbors, whether for scenery or botany. We stopped two or three days in the Glen, and visited the two falls. The Peabody river fall, which you and I missed, you will be glad to learn is rather difficult of access and not greatly worth seeing, while the other, Glen Ellis, which you saw, seemed even more beautiful than formerly. We also made a several days' ramble down the Androscoggin and back, visiting the famous cataract at Rumford. The volume of water is immense and the fall great, overcoming 165 feet in two points, each of a few rods in length ; but I am sorry to say that the grand central rock, which divided the fall, has been blasted away to admit the passage of logs. Its most beautiful feature, therefore, will be seen no more.

This brings to mind various of those little poems in which the bards are accustomed to contrast the variable- ness of human fate with the fixed aspects of Nature. Yet she herself is scarcely less changeable, and I rarely re- member a scene which, revisited after some years, had not undergone great alterations, not only in vegetation, but in the shapes of the very rocks. Niagara itself does not appear to ourselves as to the generation which preceded us, nor even to some of our friends who saw it before we did. Far different still was it to the eyes which saw it plunge directly into Lake Ontario, and yet greater will be the change to those which shall regard it at a future day when every vestige of Goat Island shall be swept away — an event whose distance in time is susceptible of an approximate calculation.

At Bethel (not Big Bethel, but bigger) we spent two nights — saw in the distance the lofty pyramidal peak of

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