NEW-ENGLAND SCENERV. 
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. Everywhere 
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 
v^hich 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 wea.ves, it 
prints."t 
* The White Mountains of New-Hampshire, 
t Daniel Webster. 
T 
