Arcadian days Author:William Howe Downes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EVERLASTING HILLS. ALL generous natures love the hills. The love of liberty flourishes in high places. Tyrants could never enslave the mountaineers. ... more »Switzerland must ever be a republic. The Scotch highlanders are invincible friends of freedom. In our own country slavery and rebellion could not get a foothold in the loyal mountains of West Virginia and East Tennessee. It is useless to multiply instances, because history is so full of eloquent illustrations that volumes would be needed to set forth the virtue and liberality of the dwellers on the heights. It is not hard to appreciate and pity the proverbial homesickness of the wandering Swiss; and who, except a railroad contractor, does not abhor a flat country ? Thank Heaven that New England is no dreary, endless prairie, no monotonous plain. Surely no one can accuse our domain of a want of diversity. From the St. Lawrence to Long Island Sound it is an almost uninterrupted succession of rugged hills, with peaceful valleys lying between. All our hills have certain characteristics in common, and the giants of the Presidential range are but exaggerated types of their kind. Their preeminence, however, is undisputed and indisputable. There is nothing finer in all the poetry relating to mountains than that proud soliloquy which Emerson puts into the mouth of Mount Monadnock, beginning: — "Every morn I lift my head, Gaze on New England underspread. ..." The consciousness of might, the superb calm of acknowledged power and dominion, the lofty disdain of a Titan for the pigmies that fret and fume at his feet, all this and more is expressed in the grim, quaint speech of the mountain. Everything is relative, so that Mount Washington, who would be a very petty prince indeed among the Alps, is every inch a king in New Hamp...« less