FROM LAKE GEORGE TO BURLINGTON

August 12, 1870

Lake Champlain, New York.

I HAVE SPENT TO-DAY AMID LAKES AND MOUNTAINS. I LEFT the further end of Lake George in a little steamer in the early morning. The three hours’ sail which you thus obtain is full of delightful beauty. The whole lake is framed in the noblest, purest mountain-masses. On the sides of the mountains, as we started, the clouds lay heavy and low, shutting us in, almost, to our little world of water; and during our transit they occasionally broke into rapid momentary rain; but on the whole I think they gave us quite as many effects as they concealed. At moments, when they thinned and lifted, the pale watery light yellowed the heavy darkness of the ranged forests into a languid counterfeit of autumn. The circling mountains faded and deepened in this passage like arriving and departing ghosts. The great hills group themselves about the upper portions of Lake George with a multitudinous majesty and variety which I shall not attempt to describe. They recede in dimly vaporous bays, where you barely feel their grim walls darkening through the cold gray sheets of cloud; they protrude in great headlands and break the mist with their cliffed and crested foreheads. The especial beauty of Lake George is believed to consist in its innumerable little islands. Many of these are extremely small—a growing-place for a dozen trees; several are large enough to contain a couple of houses. On one of them we saw some brave pleasure-seekers encamped, who came down to the water’s edge in the rain and cheered us with a beautiful, cheerful bravado. The scenery about the lake, as a whole, is such a vast simple undisturbed wilderness, that you are almost startled to behold these various little makeshifts of civilization; you half wonder at our capital little steamer and at the young ladies from the hotel on the deck, with copies of “Lothair” in their hands. Landing at the head of the lake, we mounted on stages and drove some four miles to Ticonderoga and the edge of Lake Champlain—passing on our way through a little village which seemed to me, save for its setting of hills, more drearily, dirtily, glaringly void of any poor, pitiful little incident of village prettiness than a village with as fine a name—it was called Ticonderoga—had a right to be. The last mile of the four brings you into a bit of country prettier to my eye, almost, than any other in all this beautiful region. Through a poor wooden gateway, erected as if with a sort of sense of its guarded treasure, you enter a great tract of grassy slopes and scattered trees, which seem to tell you that nature herself has determined for once to aim at pure privacy, and to bestow upon a great rough expanse of American woodland the distinction of aspect of a nobleman’s park. The short grass rolls downward in easy slopes, shaded by dense yet desultory groups of walnut and oak. You glance down the short vistas, as if to discover a browsing deer, or, perhaps, in the purer essence of romance and of baronial landscape, the sauntering daughter of an earl. But the pleasant avenue brings you only to the simple ruins of the grass-grown fort and to a sudden view of Champlain at your feet.

Of the fort I shall not speak: I dined, perforce, in the half-hour during which I might fastingly have explored it. I saw it only from the top of the coach as we passed. It seemed to me in quite the perfection of decay—of stony decrepitude and verdurous overgrowth—and to exhale with sufficient force a meagre historic melancholy. I prefer to speak of the lake, though of this, indeed, there is but little to say, and I have little space to say it. My sail hitherward of four hours showed me the most and the best of it. There is something, to my sense, in the physiognomy of Lake Champlain delightfully free, noble, and open. It is narrow for a lake and broad for a river, yet it strikes you more as a river. The water is less blue and pure than that of Lake George—a concession of quality to quantity. But its great beauty is the really great style of the landscape: this grand unflowing river, as it seems, with the generous, prolonged simplicity of its shores—green and level, without being low, on the east (till you come abreast of the Green Mountains), on the west bordered by an immense panorama of magnificent hills, receding more dimly from line to line till they meet the steady azure of the great wall of the Adirondacks. At Burlington your seeming river broadens as if to the meeting of the sea, and the forward horizon becomes a long water-line. Hereabouts the Green Mountains rise up in the east to gaze across the broad interval at their marshalled peers in New York. The vast reach of the lake and this double mountain view go far to make Burlington a supremely beautiful town. I know of it only so much as I learned in an hour’s stroll, after my arrival. The lower portion by the lake-side is savagely raw and shabby, but as it ascends the long hill, which it partly covers, it gradually becomes the most truly charming, I fancy, of New England country towns. I followed a long street which leaves the hotel, crosses a rough, shallow ravine, which seems to divide it from the ugly poorness of the commercial quarter, and ascends a stately, shaded, residential avenue to no less a pinnacle of dignity than the University of Vermont. The university is a plain red building, with a cupola of beaten tin, shining like the dome of a Greek church, modestly embowered in scholastic shade—shade as modest as the number of its last batch of graduates, which I wouldn’t for the world repeat. It faces a small enclosed and planted common; the whole spot is full of civic greenness and stillness and sweetness. It pleased me deeply, considering what it was; it reminded me the least bit in the world of a sort of primitive development of an English cathedral close. On the summit of the hill, where it leaves the town, you embrace the whole circling presence of the distant mountains; you see Mount Mansfield looking over lake and land at Mount Marcy. Equally with the view, though—I had been having views all day—I enjoyed, as I passed again along the avenue, the pleasant, solid American homes, with their blooming breadth of garden, sacred with peace and summer and twilight. I say “solid” with intent; the most of them seemed to have been tested and ripened by time. One of them there was—but of it I shall say nothing. I reserve it for its proper immortality in the first chapter of the great American novel. It perhaps added a touch to my light impression of the old and the graceful that, as I wandered back to my hotel in the dusk, I heard repeatedly, as the homefaring laborers passed me in couples, the sound of a tongue of other than Yankee inflections. It was Canadian French.