Mount Holyoke 



79 



that he can turn aside from the beaten track, urge his way through 

 the tangled thicket, and climb the craggy cliff There is a peculiar 

 pleasure, which such a man only can experience, in feeling that he has 

 reached a point perhaps never trodden by human foot, and is the first 

 of the rational creation that ever feasted on the landscape before him. 



In the view from Holyoke we have the grand and the beautiful 

 united ; the latter, however, greatly predominating. The observer 

 rinds himself lifted up nearly a thousand feet from the midst of a plain 

 which, northerly and southerly, is of great extent ; and so comparative- 

 ly narrow is the naked rock on which he stands, that he wonders why 

 the winds and storms of centuries have not broken it down. He 

 soon, however, forgets the mountain beneath him, in the absorbing 

 beauties before him. For it is not a barren unenlivened plain on 

 which his eye rests ; but a rich alluvial valley, geometrically diversi- 

 fied in the summer with grass, corn, grain, and whatever else labori- 

 ous industry has there reared. On the west, and a little elevated 

 above the general level, the eye turns with delight to the populous 

 village of Northampton ; exhibiting in its public edifices, and private 

 dwellings an unusual degree of neatness and elegance. A little more 

 to the right, the neat and substantial villages of Hadley and Hatfield,, 

 and still farther east and more distant, Amherst with its College,, 

 Gymnasium, and Academy, on a commanding eminence, form pleas- 

 ant resting places for the eye. But the object that perhaps most of all 

 arrests the attention of the man of taste, is the Connecticut, winding 

 its way majestically, yet most beautifully, through the meadows of 

 Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton ; and directly in front of Holyoke, 

 as if it loved to linger in so tranquil a spot, it sweeps around in a 

 graceful curve of three miles extent, without advancing in its ocean- 

 ward course a hundred rods. Then it passes directly through the 

 deep opening between Holyoke and Tom, which its own waters, or 

 more probably, other agencies have excavated in early times. Below 

 this point, the Connecticut is in full view, like a serpentine mirror, for 

 nearly twenty miles. And through a deception, explicable by the laws 

 of perspective, there seems to be a gradual ascent of the river, the 

 whole distance, till at its vanishing place it seems elevated nearly to 

 a level with the eye: — just as the parallel sides of a long avenue seem 

 to approach nearer and nearer until they meet. 



The valley on the south of Holyoke is not as interesting as that on 

 the west and north ; chiefly because the land is less fertile. The vil- 

 lage of South Hadley is indeed a pleasing object. But Springfield, one 



