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Untitled Article
traveller , as he passes through , is struck with astonishment to behold enormous oaks , some hundred feet over his head , growing out of the perpendicular sides of these rocky barriers , which appear like immense sheets of foliage stretched out on both sides . The narrowness of this passage is such , that in many places the road is overhung by the rocky wall : the sun shines into it only for a short space during the day , and in the heat of a summer noon the air of the Gulf is chilling .
A handful of houses in the midst of these mountains bears the name of Montpelier , and the title of the capital Vermont . It is as unpretending a metropolis as is perhaps anywhere to be found ; but the Vermonters are distinguished for their republican simplicity : the governor of the state does not think it scorn to
drive his own team ; indeed , the salary of this magistrate is not such as to encourage any unnecessary splendour , and the office has frequently gone a begging . Political ambition is not likely to disturb the happy repose of these honest mountaineers . Nor is their ' golden mean' of property less secure . Here are no rich men , as the Englishman would count riches : no enormous
heaps of wealth , like overgrown sponges , sucking up every stream of affluence within their reach , and making dryness and dearth around them . No sudden fortunes offer a temptation to cupidity and wild adventure , or disgust patient industry with its slow and sure career to competence . Riches and poverty are alike unknown ,
and unknown too is the corruption of morals commonly following in their train . Here is no hopeless want or sudden misfortune to engender the e circumstance , that unspiritual god and miscreator , ' that helps along a vicious tendency ; and where there is least temptation to crime , there will be fewest criminals .
I love wild scenery ; ' tis a delight to contemplate nature out of prison , for earth ' s aspect may exhibit too much of man , and European scenery bears , to my eyes , a great deal of this character . The dark forests have been thinned , the mountain sides laid bare , the plains rent by the plough , covered with habitations ,
or scored with walls and hedges ; cast your eyes where you will , every spot is full of art . But in' America the primeval features of the country still predominate , and art only appears as an occasional embellishment or contrast to set off" in a stronger light the wildness of nature . < Oh , there is sweetness in the mountain
air ! ' but he who uttered this exclamation would have felt its truth tenfold had he ever snuffed the mountain air of the new world , whfere the piles of native forest and the untouched soil breathe forth a fragrance upon the gale that the Alps and Apennines know nothing of . The remembrance that occasions one of the chief longings of the American while absent in Europe , is that of the fresh odour of his native woods . The scent of an orange grove does not awaken so delicious sensation as when some sylvan dell sends forth from its dense foliage of pine or oak
Untitled Article
American Sketches . 101
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1835, page 101, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2642/page/21/
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