Yet such as it is, it is thoroughly lovely. Great simple masses of wooded hills rise with a plain green nearness, to right and left; further, as the lake recedes, they increase in size and in magic of colors, and in the uttermost background they figure nobly in outline and hue, with the magnitude and mystery of a mountain chain. A friend at Saratoga informed me that Lake George is considered strongly to resemble the Lake of Como. A year ago, almost at the present moment, I spent a week on the shores of that divinest of lakes, and I think that, even unreminded by my friends, I should occasionally be prompted to an attempt at comparison and contrast. It is in a certain way unwise and even unkind to play this sort of game with the things of America and of Italy, but it seems to me that comparisons are odious only when they are sterile, and intruders only when they are forced. Lake George is quite enough like the Lake of Como to impel you, if the image of the latter is fresh in your mind, to pursue the likeness to its inevitable phase of unlikeness. The mountains which melt into those blue Italian waters are clad with olives and vines, with groves of mulberry and chestnut and ilex, with a verdure productive of a wholly different range of effects from that of the sombre forests of the North. And yet, such is the in-finite mercy of the sun, its inscrutable cunning and power, that, to-day, as the morning light spent itself through the long hours over the sullen darkness of these American hills, it tempered and tinted and softened them, and wrought upon them such a sweet confusion of exquisite tones, such a dimness of distant blue, such a brilliant tissue of noonday vapors, such a fine-drawn purity of outline, that they seemed to borrow their beauty from a Southern air and to shine with that mild, iridescent, opaline glow which you enjoy from the little headland above Bellagio. It is the complete absence of detail which betrays the identity of American scenery. On those Italian slopes the fancy travels with the eye from one bright sign of human presence to another, from a gleaming mountain hamlet to the lonely twinkle of a mountain shrine. In our own landscape, if the background in its greatest beauty is in a sense common, undetermined, and general, the foreground is even more so, inasmuch as in the foreground there is usually an attempt at detail. Here, on the left shore of the lake, is a saw-mill with a high black chimney, a dozen little white wooden houses, and a little promontory of planks on posts, in the nature of a steamboat-pier. This brave little attempt at civilization looks as transient and accidental as the furniture of a dream. Above it mounts the long-drawn roundness of the wooded hills. Their woods of course supply the saw-mill, and the saw-mill supplies the excellent plank-road. I followed this road yesterday through the village to a point where, having entered the relapsing woods, it throws out two tributary arms. The plank-road pursues its way to other little settlements, expectant of the coach. One of the other roads keeps along the lake—“a little piece away,” as a young girl of the country told me. The third observes a middling course, along the lower slope of the hills, above the lake road. I wandered along the last, to excellent purpose as regards the pursuit of the picturesque: through the coolness of thinly divided woods, past little bald grey farm-houses, lonely and sunny in their midsummer plenitude, past an occasional cottage of gentility—a built and dedicated point of view. I shall long remember a certain little farm-house before which I stayed my steps to stare and enjoy. If the pure picturesque means simply the presentation of a picture, self-informed and complete, I have seen nothing in Italy or England which better deserves the praise. Here, for once, the picture swarmed with detail—less, however, with the scattered accessories of the usual warm-toned farmstead of tradition than with the rich invasive presence of spontaneous nature and the tangled overgrowth of rank vegetation. No Tuscan podere could have been more densely and gracefully luxuriant. The little unpainted dwelling stood on a grassy slope—leaden-grey in the shade, silver-grey in the sun. Against the darkness of the open doorway, from where I stood, I saw a white butterfly soar and sink—I almost heard in the noonday stillness the soundless whirr of his wings. The milk-pans glittered in the sun; beside the house-wall a magnificent clump of pink hollyhocks lifted its blooming stalks, touching almost the roof, and adding the hint of another color to the abounding green and yellow and blue. The deeper grass, toward the fence and roadside, was a great expansive blaze of golden-rod. It seemed to glitter upward toward the milder yellow of the crowded apples in the crowded trees of the orchard. This orchard—its trees all high and noble in spite of their bended breadth—lost itself in a tangled confusion of verdurous background, so that it was hard to say whether it was an orchard run wild with excessive productiveness, or a piece of the mountain wilderness come down to be tame and prolific.