It is all green, lonely, and vacant. If you wish to seize an “effect,” you must stop beneath a cluster of pines and listen to the murmur of the softly-troubled air, or follow upward the gradual bending of their trunks to where the afternoon light touches and enchants them. Here and there on a slope by the roadside stands a rough unpainted farm-house, looking as if its dreary blackness were the result of its standing dark and lonely amid so many months, and such a wide expanse, of winter snow. The principal feature of the grassy unfurnished yard is the great wood-pile, telling grimly of the long reversion of the summer. For the time, however, it looks down contentedly enough over a goodly appanage of grain-fields and orchards, and I can fancy that it may be good to be a boy there. But to be a man, it must be quite what the lean, brown, serious farmers physiognomically hint it to be. You have, however, at the present season, for your additional beguilement, on the eastern horizon, the vision of the long bold chain of the Green Mountains, clad in that single coat of simple candid blue which is the favorite garment of our American hills. As a visitor, too, you have for an afternoon’s excursion your choice between a couple of lakes. Saratoga Lake, the larger and more distant of the two, is the goal of the regular afternoon drive. Above the shore is a well-appointed tavern—“Moon’s” it is called by the voice of fame—where you may sit upon a broad piazza and partake of fried potatoes and “drinks”; the latter, if you happen to have come from poor dislicensed Boston, a peculiarly gratifying privilege. You enjoy the felicity sighed for by that wanton Italian princess of the anecdote, when, one summer evening, to the sound of music, she wished that to eat an ice were a sin. The other lake is small, and its shores are unadorned by any edifice but a boat-house, where you may hire a skiff and pull yourself out into the minnow-tickled, wood-circled oval. Here, floating in its darkened half, while you watch on the opposite shore the tree-stems, white and sharp in the declining sunlight, and their foliage whitening and whispering in the breeze, and you feel that this little solitude is part of a greater and more portentous solitude, you may resolve certain passages of Ruskin, in which he dwells upon the needfulness of some human association, however remote, to make natural scenery fully impressive. You may recall that magnificent passage in which he relates having tried with such fatal effect, in a battle-haunted valley of the Jura, to fancy himself in a nameless solitude of our own continent. You feel around you, with irresistible force, the serene inexperience of undedicated nature—the absence of serious associations, the nearness, indeed, of the vulgar and trivial associations of the least picturesque of great watering-places—you feel this, and you wonder what it is you so deeply and calmly enjoy. You conclude, possibly, that it is a great advantage to be able at once to enjoy Ruskin and to enjoy what Ruskin dispraises. And hereupon you return to your hotel and read the New York papers on the plan of the French campaign and the Twenty-third Street murder.
LAKE GEORGE
August 10, 1870
Lake George, ca. 1873.
I FIND SO GREAT A PLEASURE IN TRAVELLING, AND MAINTAIN so friendly and expectant an attitude toward possible “sensations,” that they haven’t the heart to leave me altogether unvisited, though I confess that they are frequently such as may seem to lack flavor to fastidious people or to those sated with many wanderings. I found it a sensation, for instance, to come from Saratoga (for the first time) in a “drawing-room car.” I found it a luxury of an almost romantic intensity to sit in one of those revolving fauteuils and gaze through that generous, oblong plate of glass at the midsummer wilderness which bordered my route, while through a nether screen of delicate wire the summer breeze rushed in, winnowed of the grossness of cinders, and an artfully frescoed ceiling invited my gaze to rest at moments from the excessive abandon of nature. I observed that my companions on top of the coach which I subsequently mounted, were unanimous in voting Glenn’s Falls a remarkably pretty town: I therefore observed it with the view at once of enjoying its prettiness and of appraising my neighbor’s judgment. Pretty it is for a town of elements so meagre. Like Saratoga, the village is blissfully bedimmed and over-shadowed with a noble abundance of wayside verdure—by serried lines of elms and maples, and their goodly domestic umbrage in gardens and yards. It has not, however, that rounded and harmonious charm which would perhaps have made it appear a little less incongruous to me than it did to behold a public work of art at our egress from the village. Like so many other little American towns, it has its own little aesthetic fact—shining with newness—in the shape of a soldier’s monument: an obelisk, if I recollect, of a pleasant cream-colored stone, surmounted on its apex by a species of napkin, which an eagle is in the act of rending in his claws, and decorated toward the bases with four niches, enclosing four of the usual warriors contemplating the graves of their comrades. It is not very wisely conceived, perhaps, nor very cunningly executed; but there it stands, neighbored by a grosser ugliness, which, in its fair monumental breadth and permanence, it may connect with some lurking germs of future beauty. The drive to Lake George is full of a grand rough prettiness—leading you straight into the midst of the thickening hills and along the bases of half-grown mountains. When you emerge upon the lake, you find yourself fairly launched into the romance of mountain scenery.
I find here, at this little village of Caldwell, an immense hotel of a good deal of external architectural pretension—French-roofed, with a sort of high-piled and gabled complexity which, as country hotels go, makes it look vaguely picturesque. It stands directly on the lake, and boasts a really magnificent piazza—a terrace of contemplation—worthy of the beautiful view it commands. This, I believe, is not the choice quarter of the lake.
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