Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 19

by Ernest Ingersoll

Chapter XIX.

Franconia Notch and the Profile.

   Full many a spotOf hidden beauty have I chanced to espyAmong the mountains; never one like this;So lonesome and so perfectly secure;Not melancholy-no, for it is green,And bright, and fertile, furnished in itselfWith the few needful things that life require.—Wordsworth.

here next?"

"Profile House and Franconia notch."

The train left Fabyan's half an hour after breakfast, and was crowded with pleasure seekers, scattering northward. Down the Amonoosuc, now more useful to the saw-mill than lovely to the artist, we hurry past the foothills of Cherry mountain, straight eastward, seven or eight miles, along the wine-colored river, forced thus early in its youth to turn the wheels that grind the very trees upon its banks into boards and shingles. Then we alight at Bethlehem Junction, where two narrow-guage railways diverge,—one to Maplewood and Bethlehem; the other to the Profile House. A large company get out, and the solitary station becomes suddenly noisy with such a crowd as you see in a Boston station toward evening on Saturday, when young ladies predominate. Only here, instead of ravishing bonnets and dainty parasols, are equally ravishing sunhats and glengarries, with substantial umbrellas and haversacks. The rattle of alpenstocks resounds upon the platform, as though half the pretty girls were thumping along on wooden legs. Now in Switzerland, where glaciers are to be climbed and steep inclines of ice and snow to be traversed, the strong, iron-shod alpenstock is of some service; but here the peeled hemlock sticks, with rings of singeing and bows of bonnie blue ribbon, are of no account whatever, practically, more a nuisance than a help; yet everybody buys and takes one home, as a sign to all men (and more especially to all women) that they have been climbing the White Mountains; everybody, that is, except those who really do climb! N. B. We had no alpenstocks, though Prue teased Baily to get one, on the ineffective plea that "its burnt-cream color would match so well with his mustache."

The ride in the cars of the Profile & Franconia Notch Railroad, around the far-reaching flanks of that prodigious pile of rock which forms a monument to Lafayette, is perhaps the most uninteresting dozen miles in all New England. The swampy woods are so thick and tall and tangled, that one might almost as well be in a tunnel. So we unstrapped our books and began to inform ourselves in regard to Mount Lafayette and the wondrous district we were coming to,—an example which, "though I say it as shouldn't say it," it would be profitable for others to follow. Foresight in scenery-hunting, is worth any amount of hindsight.

Lafayette is 5,200 feet in height, and therefore the tallest peak in New England, outside of the Presidential range.

"It is usually regarded as the head and front of the Franconia range, isn't it?" somebody asks.

"Yes, but that term is an indefinite one, applicable properly only to the short line of elevations between the Pemigewasset and its eastern branch; whereas Lafayette is really the dominant summit of a larger wilderness-group, including the Twins, Mount ⟨Hale⟩ (named after our great preacher and story teller), and the Haystack (recently named Mount Garfield) with their subordinate hills, all of which divide the waters of the Merrimac from those of the Amonoosuc.

"'Though of similar structure to Washington,' say the books, 'Lafayette shows a marked difference in the sharpness and decision of its lines, and the thin keen profile of its summit ridge, which slopes off sharply into dark gulfs.' President Dwight placed it second only to Washington and Moosilauke in elegance and amplitude, and says: 'It is composed of three lofty conical summits, accompanied by four vast, bold, circular sweeps, formed with a grace to which in objects of this nature I had hitherto been a stranger; and which removed all doubts, in my mind, concerning the practicability of uniting the most exquisite beauty with the most splendid sublimity.' Starr King, I observe, thought it contrasted with Washington as a keen nervous temperment differs from a square-shouldered, burly, billious frame."

"Can it be climbed?"

"Easily. The guide-books describe a bridle path, kept in good repair by toll-receipts, which ascends from the Profile House through a gap in the cliffs that overhang the Franconia notch, and affords many lovely outlooks backward before it emerges upon the brow of the crags and begins to make its way toward the summit of the mountain, which slopes backward from this 'beetling verge' along the narrow ridge already spoken of. I'll read to you a part of Mr. Drake's account:—

"'Although heaped with rocks the way is easy, and is quite level. In one place, where it glides between two prodigious masses of rock dislodged from the cliff, it is so narrow as to admit only a single person at a time.'"

"Then you and I can't go," Prue breaks in.

"Why, pray tell?"

"Because we are not 'single' persons."

"He means only one person at a time, you goosey, without regard to any 'previous condition of servitude' in marriage."

"Oh, does he? Well, go on."

Baily grins and I resume:—

"'When I turned to look back down the black ravine, cutting into the south side of the mountain, my eye met nothing but immense rocks stopped in their descent on the very edge of the gulf. It is among these that a way has been found for the path, which was to me a reminiscence of the high defiles of the Isthmus of Darien; to complete the illusion, nothing was now wanting except the tinkling bells of the mules and the song of the muleteer. I climbed upon one of the high rocks, and gazed to my full content upon the granite parapet of Mount Cannon. In a few rods more the path encountered the great ravine opening into the valley of Gale river. Through its wide trough brilliant strips of this valley gleamed out far below. The village of Franconia, and the heights of Lisbon and Bethlehem now appeared on this side.'

"The writer then tells of the little Alpine lakes and the emotions they awakened, and so forth, and so forth. He thinks they look better at a distance than close to their sedgy and brackish shores. Finally he surmounts what he calls 'the first of the great billows which, rolling in to a common centre, appear to have forced the true summit a thousand feet higher;' and then (here I turn a leaf) he continues:—

"'The ascent of the pinnacle now began. It is too much a repetition, though by no means as toilsome, of the Mount Washington climb, to merit particular description. This peak, too, seems disinherited by nature. The last trees encountered are the stunted firs, with distorted little trunks, which it may have required half a century to grow as thick as the wrist. I left the region of alpine trees to enter that of gray rocks, constantly increasing in size toward the summit, where they were confusedly piled in ragged ridges, one upon another, looming large and threateningly in the distance. But as often as I stopped to breathe, I scanned this landscape o'er with all the delight of a wholly new experience. The fascination of being on a montaintop is yet to be explained. Perhaps after all it is not susceptible of analysis.…Had I staked all my hopes upon the distant view, no choice but disappointment was mine to accept. Steeped in the softest, dreamiest azure that ever dull earth borrowed from bright heaven, a hundred peaks lifted their airy turrets on high. These castles of the air—for I will maintain that they were nothing else—loomed with enchanting grace, the nearest, like battlements of turquoise and amethyst, or, receding through infinite gradations to the merest shadows, seemed but the dusky reflection of those less remote. The air was full of illusions; there was bright sunshine, yet only a deluge of semi-opaque golden vapor; there were forms without substance. See those iron-ribbed, deep-crested mountains! I declare it seemed as if a swallow might fly through them with ease! Over the great Twin chain were traced, apparently on the air itself, some humid outlines of surpassing grace which I recognized for the great White Mountains. It was a dream of the great poetic past; of the golden age of Milton and of Dante. The mountains seemed dissolving and floating away before my eyes. Stretched beneath the huge land-billows, the valleys—north, south, or west—reflected the fervid sunshine with softened brilliance, and all those white farms and hamlets spotting them looked like flakes of foam in the hollows of an immense ocean.'

"And then follows," I go on to remark to my companions, "a bit of sentiment which I have often felt like expressing myself."

"Under those circumstances your silence is amazing to us," is Baily's impertinent reply. "Do let us hear it!"

"Very well—listen."

"'Heaven forbid that I should profane such a scene with the dry recital of this view or that! I did not even think of it. A study of one of nature's most capricious moods interested me far more than the study of the topograpy. How should I know that what I saw were mountains, when the earth itself was not clearly distinguishable. Alone, surrounded by all these delusions, I had, indeed, a support for my feet, but none whatever for the bewildered senses.'"

"What season was that?"

"June,—should we go up now, the clear October air would betray all those illusions in clear outlines, and perhaps take away half their beauty."

"Ah!" exclaims Prue, but think of the peaks, touched with the white of early snow, falling away into that gay drapery of the reddened forests that now must clothe all their slopes and carpet the wild lovely valleys between!"

Then the whistle sounded, we rushed past a bit of blue water which half a dozen passengers told one another, was Echo lake, and came to a standstill among the trees, beside a bustling little cottage-station. The platform was thronged with people, and boys in gilt-edged uniforms were dodging about collecting baggage checks and answering questions, while some men on the other side, whip in hand, were bawling, "This way for carriages to the Flume!"

We gave up our luggage and followed a human current setting through an inclined bridge, or covered way, and in two minutes came out into an open space, boxed in by huge purple cliffs and opening toward the left down a wooded cañon, where stood an old-fashioned, stately, high-pillared, southern-looking building, the Profile House.

"No situation could be more sequestered or more charming. An oval, grassy plain, not extensive, but bright and smiling, spreads its green between a grisly precipice and a shaggy mountain. And there, if you will believe me, in front of the long white columned hotel, like a Turkish rug on a carpet, was a pretty flower-garden. Like those flowers on the lawn were pretty beauties sauntering up and down in exquisite morning toilets, coquetting with their bright-colored parasols…and little children fluttered about the grass like beautiful butterflies, and as unmindful of the terrors that hovered over them so threateningly. Nurses in their stiff grenadier caps and white aprons, lackeys in livery, cadets in uniform, elegant equipages, blooded horses, dainty shapes on horse-back, cavaliers, and last, but not least, the resolute pedestrian, or the gentlemen strollers up and down the shaded avenues, made up a scene as animated as attractive."

Who does not know the Profile House, the Franconia notch, and the Flume, who knows anything at all of the White Mountains? Its story is as old as the history of pleasure-taking in New England. Our great-grandfathers in queues and kneebreeches wooed there the blushing girls in flowered satins and high back-combs who became our great-grandmothers; and their children, with changing clothes, but unchanged hearts, have gone on doing so ever since under the eternally discreet silence of the grand old crags. Other places are imbued with the history of heroism, and shine with the glory of a writer's or a painter's fame; but this glen is illuminated with the perpetual rose-light of romance.

By the time we have freshened up and reassembled in the ample, carpeted assembly-room of the hotel, where the clerk's office is merely a convenient piece of furniture, dinner is ready, and we find ourselves seated near one end of the long dining-room, where hundreds can sit at once, and feel themselves almost in a banquet hall; and while we are waited on by the white-capped maidens, whose service in all these mountain houses is such a pleasant change from the Limerick-French men-waiters of city hotels, Prue asks for geographical information.

"We are at the entrance, or within the northern gates of the Franconia notch," she is informed. "This is a narrow gap north and south between the Franconia range on the east and a group of mountains west, of which latter, Kinsman, 4,300 feet high, and Cannon or Profile, 3,800 feet, are the biggest peaks. The waters flow from their western slopes into the Connecticut. Just above us is Echo lake; just below, Profile lake. The former overflows into the Amonoosuc; the latter struggles out through the notch to find its way straight southward into the Merrimac. All along its bank passes a capital turnpike from Plymouth to Franconia and beyond, which has been a stage road for more than fifty years. Franconia is a neat manufacturing village half a dozen miles northward. That stately, dark precipice eastward is Eagle cliff,—a spur of Mount Lafayette; and below it, on the same side, are the frowning battlements of Lincoln and Liberty. The lofty dome and ridge opposite is Mount Cannon, which, at its abrupt southern end "breaks into human expression," the ledges at its beetling summit forming, as we see them from the glen, the Human Profile, or Great Stone Face, or Old Man of the Mountain, which has given to the locality a world-wide celebrity."

"What about the Flume?"

"Half a dozen miles down the notch, and more than 500 feet lower—you can imagine what a torrent the little river is all the way—stands a somewhat smaller hotel, under the same management as this one, called the Flume House, where people stop who care to do more than make a casual visit to the gorge and its wonders.

"Its surroundings are wholly unlike those of the Profile House. There you are outside of the huge upheavals that here hem us in, and you can see the peaks hidden from us behind these imminent crags. 'From the Flume House,' says Starr King, 'the general view is cheerful and soothing. There is no place among the mountains where the fever can be taken more gently and cunningly out of a worried or burdened brain. So soft and delicate are the general features of the outlook over the widening Pemigewasset valley! So rich the gradation of the lights over the miles of gently sloping forest that sweep down towards Campton! So pleasant the openings here and there that show a cluster of farm-houses, and the bright beauty of cultivated meadows enclosed by the deeper green of the wilderness!' In front of the Flume House the long wooded ridge of Liberty has its irregularities so shaped that they form a recumbent figure in which you will please see a resemblance to the Father of his Country, 'dead and turned to clay,' because that is Washington lying in State.

"There is an Elephant in this notch, too, quite as good as that owned by the Crawford House; and a little way below is the Pool,—a circular basin reamed out and still being enlarged by the eddying river which pours into it down a white cascade, hidden in the midst of a most secluded and savage mass of rocks and forest. The whirling water is a glossy and lustrous sea-green, and of such marvelous transparency that you see the brilliant pebbles sparkling at the bottom, shifting with the waves of light like bits of glass in a Kaleidoscope. Overtopping trees lean timidly over and peer down into the Pool, which coldly repulses their shadows. Only the colorless hue of the rocks is reflected,—

'As if were here deniedThe summer sun, the spring's sweet dew,That clothe with many a varied hueThe bleakest mountain-side.'"

"Don't you think," Baily interrupts, sotto voce, that you'd better hire a hall?"

I look up from my untasted plate, abashed, for all the table are listening, and Prue is dying to laugh.

"Heavens!" I ejaculate. "That isn't my eloquence! I never saw the place! I'm only telling you what I've heard about it!" Then the laughter came in a burst of gayety at my expense in which I had not only to join to save my reputation, but also to order Bordeaux enough to wash away the memory of my discomforture from the minds of all my tablemates.

That's what I got through playing the prig! and I won't forget it.

Nevertheless, the facts were all true enough, as we proved by a long satisfactory visit of exploration, to which we devoted all the next day, walking slowly down to the Flume House along a park-like road, through groves of birches turned golden by frost. The first object of pilgrimage, of course, was The Flume, just 'round the corner, as it were, a little way up Flume brook, which pitches down from Mount Liberty, and has cut a way for itself through the rocks in the form of a narrow crevice to which the word "flume" very properly applies. It is a wild, pretty little glen, but I do not share in the lavish praise that has been bestowed upon it, or the marvel it has been called. Hamilton Gibson's lovely drawing of it, like almost all the other pictures I have seen, immensely exaggerates, and makes it look like a Rocky Mountain cañon, which it is not, by any means. I could find a dozen crevices in the Virginia mountains far deeper and more interesting. Mr. Sweetzer's straight-forward description fits it best. "The flume," he says, "is a half to a third of a mile from the hotel, and is reached by a good carriage-road which crosses the Pemigewasset river. The road stops near the Flume brook, whose course is ascended by a foot-path leading over clean sheets of granite, broad and slightly tilted, across which the water slips 'in thin, wide, even sheets of crystal colorlessness' for several hundred feet. Farther up, the ledges are more rugged, and the limpid brook lingers in rock-rimmed basins. The Flume is a marvellous fissure in the side of Mount Flume, through which dashes a brilliant little brook. It is about 700 feet long, and is flanked by mural precipices 60-70 feet high. These walls are perpendicular and parallel, and are from ten to twenty feet from each other. A plank walk extends through the gorge, crossing the stream several times. A great boulder for centuries hung between the approaching cliffs in the upper part of the Flume, but was swept away in June, 1883, when a tremendous avalanche, caused by heavy storms on the peaks above, swept through the defile, scouring it out, and increasing its length. The lowlands below were covered with myriads of boulders and acres of rocky debris. After the wreck, two pretty waterfalls appeared in the Flume, almost compensating for the loss of the great suspended boulder. The morning is the best time to visit this locality."

The boulder seems to have been the chief object of interest and to have merited this distinction; but in view of its loss it is amusing to read Starr King's rhapsody over "the huge boulder, egg-shaped, that is lodged between the walls just over the bridge where we stand,—as unpleasant to look at, if the nerves are irresolute, as the sword of Damocles, and yet held by a grasp out of which it will not slip for centuries?"

The morning after this great washout, workmen were set digging in the wide mass of debris spread along the outlet of the brook to find it. Before night a boulder had been fished out, set high and dry upon the bank, and fenced in so that it could'nt get away, like the Pilgrim Rock at Plymouth, and, its identity like that historic stone, labeled so that there should be no doubt about it.

"Do you mean to say that you don't believe it?" exclaims Prue, who seems to think I am bound to praise everything, irrespective of the way it strikes me.

"This is an age of free thought, my dear," I tell her "and you can believe it or not without danger of the stake; but it is also an age of skepticism. My honest opinion is, that this fenced-in boulder is a fraud unworthy of the dignity of Franconia notch, than which there is nothing more beautiful in the mountains; and of the people who perpetrate it."

The brook channel supplies a way (not a path) of reaching the tops of the lower Franconia mountains,—Flume, Liberty, and Lincoln, whence the views are grand, and considerably different from that displayed from Lafayette; but the task is an extremely severe one. To Mount Pemigewasset, a spur of Mount Kinsman on the opposite side, a bridle path gives ready access, and ladies often go to the summit. The view is of the same character as that presented from the front-door of the Flume House, but, of course, far wider and more impressive. Starr King makes one of his most delightful paragraphs in telling how the sunset splendor, seen from this high point, must irradiate the eastern heights.

From the Profile House many delightful excursions are open to your choice. You may ramble up Mount Cannon, as did the gay party in Their Pilgrimage, and lose your hand where you have already lost your heart; but don't loose your footing! You may go down to Echo lake, and hear the bugle blown and listen to the purple glen's replying; hold your breath while the cannon is fired and count the salvos returned by the water-batteries of Eagle cliff and Bald mountain, and then by the lighter, loftier artillery in the fortresses of Lafayette and the Profile ridge; you may get your insulting yells thrown back in your teeth a dozen times over by the outraged spirits chained to the rocks that tower so menacingly overhead; or, in gentler mood, you persuade your sweet-voiced friend to sing some delicate strain, while you row her to the middle of the blue lakelet, or watch her downcast lashes as she sits in the stern of the little steam-yacht, happy that her voice can be so often repeated by the jealous hills in "the winding wandering music, that returns upon itself." You may drive over to the gay Forest Hills hotel, at Franconia, and hobnob with a crowd that will match your own. You may ride up Lafayette and fish or paddle in Profile lake; and you may—nay must—fill your eyes and mind and soul with the Profile itself. At last then, I have come to this,—the first thing in the Notch; but it is well worth saving until the last in my description.

From the lawns and flower-parterres in front of the hotel, a hard road, overshadowed by the magnificent bronze and purple wall of Eagle cliff, hundreds of feet in almost vertical height, winds down through the birch groves and thickets past a little lake, a quarter of a mile distant. Walk, or, if you please, run, down this road, keeping your eyes of Cannon's ridges upon the west, until you catch glimpses of the shimmering surface of the pond through the dusty white trunks of the trees. Then go slowly, and watch for an opening in the grove upon your right hand.

Suddenly this opening will disclose itself, and there, framed in by the gap, jutting from the very head of the long abruptly ending ridge of Mount Cannon, is the Great Stone Face—a silhouette of colossal size cut in granite—"a mountain breaking into human expression." And it is human expression! Fanciful resemblances to faces and forms of every sort are constantly pointed out upon exposed rocks; but here there can be no more uncertainty than in looking at a portrait-statue. It is, indeed, as if some artist among the Titans, some rude progenitor of the Egyptian sculptors who cut the collossi that look with hollowed eyes from the bluffs of Karnac out across the Nile, had begun to chisel a hero's head from the living rock of the crag; had first completed the face and then ceased his work before isolating the head from the bulk of the mountain. But this is no thick-lipped, round-nostrilled, heavy-lidded Pharaonic face, but an alert, sharp-featured, firm-mouthed and clean-chinned Saxon face of advanced age—a hardy Yankee mountaineer—a type set on high here at the pinnacle of New England of the energetic and irresistible race which was to possess her mountains and plains; and his eyes are fixed steadily toward the west, whither he already sees the star of his empire taking its course. These are the thoughts the face suggest to me. It looks like the portrait of a pioneer,—the presentiment in stone of the spirit of '76; and while for unnumbered centuries it was prophetic, it is now fast becoming a reminiscence, since the lines of that face belong rather to the stern type of a bygone generation than to the more delicately moulded faces of to-day.

Summer houses and seats are arranged by the lake, where you may sit and read the face at your leisure, and dream over its origin and its destiny; or you may take one of the many skiffs, row out upon the mirroring waters and study the head with all its magnificent surroundings; but you will never weary of it, nor lose your sense of its mystery, grandeur, and humanity. It does not simply tickle your sense of wonder—it excites your sympathy; and in sunshine, in shadow, under the varying lights of morning, noon, or night, in clear days and misty days, sharp against the blazing sunset sky or isolated by rising mists, it "speaks a various language" and enforces its personality upon your mind.

Ticknor's Guide tells us that it was discovered in 1805, by Francis Whitcomb and Luke Brooks, who were working on the Notch road, and saw it while washing their hands in Profile lake. They exclaimed, "That is Jefferson," he being then President. Hawthorne's tale of The Great Stone Face, and a later book called Christus Judex, celebrate this marvellous outline. There is a probability that it may not last for many years longer, on account of the rapid decomposition of the granite, which crumbles under the hand, and the geologist Hitchcock, has advised any persons who are anxious to see the Profile for themselves, to hasten to the spot, for fear of disappointment. It is formed of three disconnected ledges of granite, in different vertical lines, their aggregate height being 36-40 feet; and their height above the lake, 1,200 feet. One rock forms the forehead, another the nose and upper lip, and the third the massive chin.

The decay to which it is subject may account for the varying expressions which writers have found in it; differing points of view too, will alter this countenance, while at only a little distance up or down the road, the human resemblance is altogether lost. One of the oldest descriptions is that of Oakes, who calls it "the greatest object of popular curiosity in the vicinity of the White Mountains," and says: "The expression is severe and somewhat melancholy, and although there is a little feebleness about the mouth, on the whole the face of the Old Man of the Mountain' is set, and his countenance fixed firm. He neither blinks at the near flashes of the lightning beneath his nose, nor flinches from the driving snow and sleet of the Franconia winter, which makes the very mercury of the thermometer shrink into the bulb and congeal."

Starr King found in it an intimation of the human countenance, which is the crown of all beauty, pushed out from the coarse strata of New England thousands of years before Adam.…The expression is really noble, with a suggestion partly of fatigue and melancholy. He seems to be waiting for some visitor or message.…When, after an August shower, late in the afternoon, the mists that rise from the forests below congregate around it, and, smitten with sunshine, break as they drift against its nervous outline, and hiding the mass of the mountain which it overhangs, isolate it with a thin halo, the countenance, awful but benignant, is as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills, and enrobing himself in a cloud-vesture of gold and purple." Drake suggests that it was begotten by a thunderbolt, and confesses to a fascination that drew his eyes irresistibly back to it from all other scenery. "The face," he exclaims, "is too majestic, too nobly grand, for any thing of mortal mould. One of the antique gods, may, perhaps, have sat for this archetype of the coming man." An "almost superhuman expression of frozen terror"—a "far-away look"—"an intense and speechless amazement…seeming to declare the presence of some unutterable vision, too bright and dazzling for mortal eyes to behold," are the phrases by which this writer tries to convey its effect upon him. "It does everything but speak,—nay, you are ready to swear that it is going to speak!…Let the visitor be ever so unimpassioned, surely he must be more than mortal to resist the impression of mingled awe, wonder, and admiration which a first sight of this weird object forces upon him."

Thus I might multiply the record of what men, not easily moved, have thought of this startling accident of rock-crumbling, which so sublimely, so dignifiedly, portrays the human countenance, without a shade of caricature or a tinge of mockery.