The White Hills; Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And fed nt evening with the blood of suns; Grand torso, -- luind, that flung perpetually The largest of a silver river down To all the country pastures. 'Tis even thus With times we live in, -- evermore too great To be apprehended near. One of Mr. Hawthorne's admirable " Twice-told Tales " has woven a charming legend and moral about this mighty Profile; and in his description of the face the writer tells us: " It seemed as if an enormous giant, or Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other." We must reduce the scale of the charming story-teller's description. The whole profile is about eighty feet in length; and of the three separate masses of rock which are combined in its composition, one forms the forehead, another the nose and upper lip, and the third the chin. The best time to see the Profile is about four in the afternoon of a summer day. Then, standing by the little lake at the base and looking up, one fulfils the appeal of our great transcendental poet in a literal sense in looking at the jutting rocks, and, through their granite seeming Sees the smile of reason beaming. The expression is really noble, with a suggestion partly of fatigue and melancholy. He seems to be waiting for some visitor or message. On the front of the cliff there is a pretty plain picture of a man with a pack on his back, who seems to be endeavoring to go up the valley. Perhaps it is the arrival of this arrested messenger that the old stone visage has been expecting for ages. The upper portion of the mouth looks a little w...