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golden light upon river, hill and tree, giving as it were new 

 life to every leaf and flower, and, like the human eye in the 

 hour of death, sending forth its softest and brightest radiance 

 at its closing, I ask where is to be found a nobler temple, and 

 where is the human soul more loudly invoked to pay its hom- 

 age to the mighty architect of nature, the exhaustless fountain 

 of all this beneficence, the Lord of all life, the divine painter 

 of all beauty ! 



The Deerfield valley is separated from the Connecticut by a 

 high range of hills, of which llie Sugar-Loaf forms one ex- 

 tremity, and the Indian name Pocumtuck, further up, designates 

 one of the highest prominences. In proceeding up the valley 

 to the north, you soon pass the memorable field of battle at 

 Bloody Brook, "where the flower of Essex fell," now con- 

 verted into fertile fields, and the seat of the pleasant village of 

 South Deerfield. Passing farther on the Deerfield valley, lying 

 between two high ranges of hills, there opens upon the view 

 a wide-spreading tract of meadow and intervale, of extraordi- 

 nary fertility and the richest cultivation, once the favored resort 

 of the Indians and the haunt which they quitted with the 

 greatest reluctance, with the village of Deerfield lying in the 

 very centre of this magnificent basin, and the village of Green- 

 field, one of the most tasteful and beautiful on the banks of the 

 Connecticut, appearing on an elevation in the distant perspec- 

 tive. From Pocumtuck, a hill in the rear of the village of 

 Deerfield, the view is perfectly charming, and can only be 

 appreciated by being seen. Deerfield, with its neat private 

 dwellings, its academy and churches, and. above all, its mag- 

 nificent ranges of ornamental trees, the rock maple and the 

 elm. lies directly at your feet. The fields are spread before 

 you like a figured carpet, in all the richness of cultivation, 

 with their different shades of green and the varying colors 

 of the crops in their progress to maturity. The lines of culti- 

 vation are every where distinctly marked. The intervale mead- 

 ows, which are seldom or never ploughed, marked by a depth 

 of coloring which cannot be surpassed, with here and there a 



