Page:Tanglewood tales (Dulac).djvu/18

TANGLEWOOD TALES guest from Monument Mountain, Bald Summit, and Old Graylock, shaggy with primeval forests, could see anything to admire in my poor little hillside, with its growth of frail and insect-eaten locust trees. Eustace very frankly called the view from my hilltop tame; and so, no doubt, it was, after rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire, and especially the northern parts of the country with which his college residence had made him familiar. But to me there is a peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype themselves into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong impression repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains, a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines for ever new, because continually fading out of the memory—such would be my sober choice.

I doubt whether Eustace did not internally pronounce the whole thing a bore, until I led him to my predecessor's little ruined, rustic summer-house, midway on the hillside. It is a mere skeleton of slender, decaying tree trunks, with neither walls nor a roof; nothing but a tracery of branches and twigs, which the next winter blast will be very likely to scatter in fragments along the terrace. It looks, and is, as evanescent as a dream; and yet, in its rustic network of boughs, it has somehow inclosed a hint of spiritual beauty, and has become a true emblem of the subtle and ethereal mind that planned it. I made Eustace Bright sit down on a snow bank, which had heaped itself over the mossy 2