pery smoothness. Proceeding a short distance up this natural esplanade, you enter a damp and gloomy fissure between perpendicular walls, rising seventy feet above the stream, and on lifting your eyes, suddenly espy an enormous bowlder tightly wedged between the cliffs. Now try to imagine a force capable of grasping the solid rock, and dividing it in halves as easily as you would an apple with your two hands! At sight of the suspended bowlder, which seems like Paul Pry to have "just dropped in," I believe every visitor has not omit to find a moral in this curiosity, which really looks to be on the eve of dropping, with a loud splash, into the torrent beneath. On top of the cliffs I picked up a visiting-card, on which some one with a poetic turn had written, "Does not this bowlder remind you of the sword of Damocles?" To a civil question, civil reply: No; to me it looks like a nut in a cracker. Over the gorge bends an arcade of interlaced foliage, shot through and through with sunlight; underneath, the swollen torrent storms along, dashing itself against his moment of hesitation, which he usu- | protruding bowlders, or else passing them ally ends by passing underneath, paying as he goes with a tremor of the nerves, more or less, for his temerity. But there is no danger. It is seen that the deep crevice, into which the rock seems jammed with the special purpose of holding it asunder, hugs the intruder like a vise-so closely, indeed, that, according to every appearance, it must stay where it is until Doomsday, unless released by some passing earthquake. Sentimental tourists do with a curl of disdain. The cold granite The ing far below, the glitter of falling waters | celebrated natural rock-sculpture of a huthrough the trees, the splendid light in the midst of deepest gloom, the solemn pines, the odorous forest, the wildness, and the coolness-impart an indescribable charm. Ladies ascend to the head of the gorge, and perform the feat of crossing on a fallen tree that makes a crazy bridge from cliff to cliff. One, I noticed, had left her pocket-handkerchief, with the scent fresh upon it, and her initials in a corner. I picked it up, and out hopped a toad. I left the Flume House in company with a young-old man whom I met there, and in whom I hoped to find another and surer pair of eyes, for were he to have as many as Argus, the sight-seer would find employment for them all. While gayly threading the greenwood, we came upon a miniature edition of the Pool, situated close to the highway, called the Basin. A basin, in fact, it is, and a bath fit for the gods. A cascade falls into it with hollow roar. It has been worn by the rotary motion of large pebbles, which the little cascade, pouring down into it from above, set and kept actively whirling and grinding, until what was at first a mere depression became as we now see it. Long and constant attrition only could have scooped this cavity out of the granite, which is here so clean, smooth, and white, and filled to the brim with a grayish emerald water, light, limpid, and incessantly replenished by the effervescent cascade. But the really curious feature of the Basin is a strip of granite projecting into it, which closely resembles a human leg and foot luxuriously cooling itself in the stream. We are still advancing in this region of wonders. In our front soars an insuperable mass of forest-tufted rock. Behind it rises the absolutely regal Lafayette. Our footsteps are stayed by the glimmer of water through the trees. We have reached the summit of the pass. Six miles of continual ascent have brought us to Profile Lake. Although a pretty enough piece of water, it is not for itself this lake is resorted to by the thousand, or for the trout which you take for the reflection of birds on its burnished surface, but for the mountain rising high above, whose wooded slopes it so faithfully mirrors. Now lift the eyes to the bare summit. It is difficult to believe the evidence of the senses. Upon the high cliffs of this mountain is the remarkable and man head, which, from a height twelve hundred feet above the lake, has for uncounted ages looked with the same stony stare down the pass upon the windings of the river through its incomparable valley. The profile itself measures about forty feet from the tip of the chin to the flattened crown, which imparts to it such a peculiarly antique appearance. It is perfect, except that the forehead is concealed by something like the visor of a helmet. And all this illusion is produced by several projecting crags. It might be said to have been begotten by a thunder-bolt. Taking a seat within a rustic arbor on the high shore of the lake, one is at liberty to peruse at leisure what, I dare say, is the most extraordinary sight of a lifetime. A slight change of position varies more or less the character of the expression, which is, after all, the marked peculiarity of this monstrous alto-relievo; for, let the spectator turn his gaze vacantly upon the more familiar objects at hand, as he inevitably will, to assure himself that he is not the victim of some strange hallucination, a fascination born neither of admiration nor horror, but strongly partaking of both emotions, draws him irresistibly back to the Dantesque head stuck like a felon's on the highest battlements of the pass. more you may have seen, the more your feelings are disciplined, the greater the confusion of ideas. The moment is come to acknowledge yourself vanquished. This is not merely a face, it is a portrait. That is not the work of some cunning chisel, but a cast from a living head. You feel and will always maintain that those features have had a living and breathing counterpart. Nothing more, nothing less. The But where and what was the original prototype? Not man; since ages before he was created the chisel of the Almighty wrought this sculpture upon the rock above us. No, not man; the face is too majestic, too nobly grand, for anything of mortal mould. One of the antique gods may, perhaps, have sat for this ar chetype of the coming man. And yet not man, we think, for the head will surely hold the same strange converse with futurity when man shall have vanished from the face of the earth. Had Byron visited this place of awe and mystery, his "Manfred," the scene of which is laid among the mountains of 365 the Bernese Alps, would doubt- This gigantic silhouette, which has been christened the Old Man of the ON THE PROFILE ROAD. |