NEW-ENGLAND SCENERY. 



217 



Connecticut and Housatonic valleys. None ever 

 contained a more enlightened, moral, industrious, 

 free, and happy population. For beauty and varie- 

 ty, if not sublimity of scenery, New-England may 

 challenge competition with the world. Ev^ery where 



• broken and diversified, now presenting green and 

 cultivated slopes to the sight, now throwing its gran- 

 ite pillars nearly 7000 feet into the sky,* wrapped in 

 hoary clouds for ten months of the year, or cover- 

 ed with a mantle of snow; now presenting abrupt 

 precipices, fantastic hills, deep gorges, yawning 

 chasms, and verdant valleys ; everywhere alive 

 with an active and intelligent population, converting 

 its stony declivities into fruitful cultivated fields, 

 its mountains of granite and marble into polished 

 building stones, and its rich mineral treasures, in- 

 exhaustible sources of wealth, into various products 

 which minister to the necessities and comforts of 

 man. There, too, we may say, " steam is on the 

 rivers, and the boatman may repose on his oars ; it 

 is on the highway, and begins to exert itself along 



■ the courses of land conveyances ; it is at the bot- 

 toms of mines a thousand feet below the earth's sur- 

 face ; it is in the mill, and in the workshops of the 

 trades. It rows, it pumps, it excavates, it carries, 

 it draws, it lifts, it hammers, it spins, it weaves, it 

 prints."! 



* The White Mountains of New -Hampshire, 

 t DanieC Webster. 



