One of the stillest
moonlight evenings, not a sound heard but the bleat of a lamb, and the murmur
of the river; all the rest a cool, broad, friendly mountainous silence. Peace
comes down with the soft clouds and mists that veil the hills; the Pemigewasset
sings all night in the moonshine, and I lie and dream of the beauty of those
hill-outlines around Winnipiseogee, that I looked upon with so satisfied a
greeting from the car window on my way hither. The mountains do not know their
own beauty anywhere but by a lakeside. So it is: beauty sets us longing for
other beauty; the clouds moving above their summits suggest possibilities that
earthly summits, at their grandest, can never attain. And no dream can suggest
the possibilities of the beautiful that “shall be revealed."
SOURCE: Daniel
Dulany Addison, Lucy Larcom: Life,
Letters, and Diary, p. 99
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