COLORADO HEIGHTS.
CCL
LITERARY.
THE CHARME.
Son of Erebus and night,
Hie away; and aim thy flight
Where consort none other fowl
Than the bat and sullen owl;
Where upon thy limber grass,
Poppy and mandragoras,
With like simples not a few
Hang forever drops of dew.
Where flows Lethe without coil
Softly like a stream of oil.
Hie thee hither, gently sleep:
With this Greek no longer keep.
Thrice I charge thee, by my wand,
Thrice with moly from my hand
Do I touch Ulysses' eyes,
And with the jaspis: then arise
Sagest Greek.
"Inner Temple Masque," 1623. WILLIAM BROWNE.
COLORADO HEIGHTS.
"Centuries old are the mountains; Their foreheads are wrinkled and rifted."
He who has seen with childhood's eyes only a rolling monotony of prairie, at first sight of mountains is filled with a peculiar delight and fascination.
There they stand in their majesty, immovable, silent, enduring for ages. Sometimes their tops are covered with snow or shrouded in mists, and sometimes outlined against a clear sky or glorified by the rising or setting sun. Yet the mountains remain the same. Secretive, they tell no tale of the treasures hidden in their rocky fastnesses, and reveal no part of their past history. Stern and solemn, they have neither sympathy nor pity for the fortunes of man. What an oppressive, almost terrible, silence there is in some of those deep gorges, and how the overhanging precipices seems to shut us out from civilization. It would seem probable that people ever living among mountains would be distinguished for all the sterner virtues, but perhaps would be deficient in the softer elements of character and in the enlightened views that should characterize a wide vision.
When the sunlight falls across the rugged side of some grand old peak, the Bugle Song suggests itself to the mind:
"The sunlight falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story; The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory."
A little imagination transposes some fantastic rock into a ruined castle, and through the clear mountain air are heard the "Horns of Elfland faintly blowing." When we were in the heart of the mountains one of our party remarked that we were "out of creation." It rather seemed that we were in chaos, the beginning of creation.
For some days we remained in full view of Long's Peak, and as we watched this