University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IV.

THE COCKNEYS EXPLAINED BY THE PRIOR OF ST. PHILIPS,
FROM THE TOP OF THE ALLEGANY.

What time the skylark plumed his wing, the expedition
awoke from its slumbers, and betimes arose;
what time the sun peeped into the casements of the
village hostel, it sat triumphant over a routed breakfast-table,
and, like Alexander, sighed that it had
no more to conquer. In this condition, he of Macedon
took to drink—but we to our wagons, with a
good-by to pleasant Romney.

The morning was delightfully bracing. Whether
it was the mountain-air, or the mountain-oats, that
inspired them, our horses carried themselves as
proud as reindeers, and went down the main street
of Romney with a free swing, fully up to the requirements
of the Dr. Johnson philosophy in this
matter. As we crossed the high plain to the bluffs
of the river, the scenery of the South-Branch valley
was just developing into expression—the mountain
in bold masses, the winding river with its mists, the
rich bottoms striped with cornfields, the long range
of brown cliffs in the distance, and in the foreground

the high plain on which sat the picturesque town:
all in striking contrasts of light and shade; the dark
shadows of the mountains, and the golden mists of
the river; the spangled dewdrops on the meadows,
and the funeral drapery of the pine-forests; Apollo,
from his chariot of the sun, elimning some new glory
of the picture, as he drove on up the steeps of the
skies.

This glimpse of the sunrise-picture was all we
saw, for it is but a mile from the town to the bluffs
of the river, and these we have already gained. We
now descended from the table-land, and crossed the
South Branch by a good bridge. With the river on
one side and the overhanging mountain on the other,
we drove on for a mile or so; when we turned off,
and passed through the mountain on almost a dead-level
road, winding along the side of a stream that
here makes its way through a deep cleft to the river.
For some fifteen miles the road is a beautiful one—
smooth, and of easy grade in its gradual rise toward
the Alleganies; now hugging the hills, now following
the bends of the streams, now through valleys
spotted with farmhouses and green with luxuriant
grass. At length we came to the Knobley, which
we ascended, passing through a hamlet scattered
carelessly along the cultivated slopes of the mountain.
This mountain presents a very remarkable outline,
being a succession of high knobs or peaks with
intervening low depressions, giving it the appearance

of an indented castle-wall. Through one of
these depressions we crossed, and descended by easy
traverses to the other side. For a mile or so we
wound our way through the defiles of a broken
range of hills, and emerged at length into a narrow
and beautifully-picturesque valley—the Allegany
piled up in grand masses on one side, and the road
running for some miles along the banks of a clear,
rapid stream, known hereabouts as New creek—
just such a stream, so wild and cool, as the imagination
would fill with trout a foot and a quarter
long, and some four inches deep behind the shoulders.

By the side of the sparkling creek, with (no doubt)
trout to be had for the casting of a fly, or the impaling
of a worm, we found a large and comfortable
brick house, where a Mr. Reese keeps an inn highly
spoken of in these parts for its excellent accommodations.
At the base of the Allegany stands invitingly
the mountain-embowered inn. In front of
this is the clear, cool, wild, dancing stream; and up
beyond this again, rises with bold ascent, almost at
right-angles to the water, a richly-wooded spur of
the Allegany, colored with all-blended hues of green,
from the pale tea-color of the mountain-ash, to the
dark, grand, gloom green, almost invisible green,
of the clustered fir-trees and hemlocks—these the
nobler pines that more particularly distinguish the
forests of the Allegany ranges.

From Reese's house, at the base, it is seven miles
to the top of the Allegany—something of an Olympus
to the warts behind us. Mindful of our horses,
we gird up our loins for the encounter, and take to
the heaven-kissing hill afoot. Half-way up there is
a fountain of pure spring-water caught in a rude
trough by the roadside; and men and horses gather
around, and revel in the mountain hippocrene. The
lookout from here is already grand. Far and wide
you behold the land we have travelled. On we go
again, up and up, still up; and the air you breathe
is freer, and the scene wilder and yet more widely
revealed at every turn of the road, rounding each
rocky promontory that juts the mountain-side.

In something more than two hours we reached
the toll-gate, situated near the summit of the ridge,
and commanding a prospect of all the land lying
abroad to the eastward. This is one of the grandest
and most diversified mountain-scenes in the whole
range of our country: mountains piled on mountains
everywhere, of every variety of size and shape,
with all their valleys, glens, gorges, dells, and narrow
defiles—all yet varied by the changing light
and shade that falls upon them from the heavens—
as the heavens are ablaze with sunshine, or swept
by passing summer-clouds.

Altogether it is such a scene as seldom meets the
eye. At once its glory has entered into the heart
and fired the imagination, and we are a thousand

times over repaid for the long, toilsome ascent that
has given it to us. To view it aright, it should be
seen under all changing aspects: at the dawn and
the sunrise; under the earlier and the later shadows
of the morning; when the midday blaze has made
it all dreamy as an ocean unmoved; as the shadows
lengthen upon it in the evening; as the gloom of
the twilight gathers over it. To see it in its greatest
sublimity, you should be here when, bare of leaf,
and all rugged in its disclosure, it is terrible with
the howling storms of winter—storms sweeping
dreadfully both the heavens and the earth!

Yet, even in a half-hour's glance, much will be
written upon the mind that can never be effaced;
and this "dim spot, that men call earth," will be
ever after greatly dignified to your appreciation. A
scene thus ennobling, let us not pass away from it
too lightly. Let us portray it, even though it be
with such indistinct limning as the few moments we
loitered at the toll gate will enable.

You are at such height here at the gate, that as
you stand looking eastward, there is nothing to
bound your vision but your natural horizon. You
are above the whole scene; and looking over it, you
may be said to look down over it. You command
it all, to the extent of the power of the eye. Far
below you, some thousands of feet, is a wood-embosomed
dell, with an open farm every here and
there spotted along it, looking at this distance like

patches of wild meadow and glade in the midst of
the vast forest around. Immediately beyond rises
a bold and rugged mountain, whose craggy top is
indented like the battlements of a castle, and whose
sides sweep down, dark with firs and hemlocks, and
every variety of pines, to the edge of the deep valley.
Looking to the right, the mountains are broken
and irregular, as if they had been tossed and
torn to pieces by some mighty upheaving of the
earth, and had thus fallen scattered about in confused,
giant masses: some elegant and majestic as
the "star'y-pointed pyramid;" some grand and
massive as the "proud bulwark on the steep;" others
of huge, misshapen bulk—the Calibans of the
wild; and others, again, so grotesque of form, that
they seem to have been moulded by the very genius
of Whim—the Merry-Andrews of the Alleganies:
and all yet beautiful and soft to the eye, with the
softening hues of summer—these summer hues producing
the same effect here that time has wrought
upon the rugged feudal castle, as so beautifully described
in the verse of Mason:—

On the left the scene is in strong contrast with
the grand and grotesque mountains we have just
described. Here, along the steeps of the Allegany,

you catch picturesque glimpses of the winding highway—and,
again, you see it boldly emerging from
the woods at the base of the mountain, and sweeping
on through the open vale, and by the banks of
the silvery stream, down past the embowered house
and cultivated lands of Reese—on—and away,
until it turns off, and is lost in the mountains. This
little valley, which but this morning we traversed
in part, now stretches itself out so far before us that
it grows indistinct and confused to the sight—its
fields so diminished in size that they look like
garden-beds; the winding stream that threads it
seeming but a waving line of silver. The picture
has all the delicacy of a scene in miniature, and
there is a witching summer-softness over it all as
of the beauty and the sheen of a voluptuous woman,
or (if you prefer it) of a ripe peach. Further over
in the mountains is a wider and more open valley,
that seems from here almost a plain, and so hazy
and indistinct are its outlines, that your imagination
exerts its fanciful power, and you see—dimly—
vaguely—towers, and temples, and mighty domes,
revealing themselves before your eyes, as if some
lordly city was about to grow up upon the plain by
enchantment. Turning again, and looking straight
forward, eastwardly, whence we came, and lo!
what ideas of vastness crowd upon the mind; for it
is all one vast sea of mountains, as far as the eye
can behold—range beyond range ever appearing—
heaving like the blue waves of some immense sea
—wave following wave in endless succession; for
your horizon being bounded everywhere by mountains,
to the imagination there is no limit, and all
beyond is wave after wave of the same giant sea.

Gazing upon this noble scene, the prior of St.
Philips grew excited—his eye dilated—his soul
was all ablaze; and no longer able to hold himself,
he stretched forth his right hand and gave tongue
as follows:—

"Gentlemen, I see into it all now, and if our
invasion of the Alleganies effects nothing else I
shall go home satisfied. Our mountains have been
greatly slandered—most vilely traduced by the
cockneys; and beholding this mighty scene, I'm
lost in wonder that some man with a large enough
soul, hasn't long since put them right before the
world."

"That's right, stick it into them, Prior; give it to
'em, County, you're the man to do it."

"Put to route and everlasting shame the whole
insolent and conceited herd."

"Let them have it as Tom Hyer gave it to Sullivan."

"Dress their jackets genteely, Prior."

"Dont spare either age, sex, or condition."

"Begin:—

"Sic who! He dont want any sicking, let him
go on."

Silence being restored, and the rage of the expedition
against the cockneys a little mollified by the
steam it had let off, Mr. Philips plunged epic-wise
into the middle of things.

"If I were called upon, gentlemen, to say what
was the great especial characteristic of our American
mountains, I would reply at once, their immensity—not
the immensity of size, but of extent—
that they fill the mind with the same order of
sublime emotion that the ocean does, with this
difference, that the sublimity, though alike in kind,
is higher in degree."

"Good, good!"

"How clear he is!"

"The mountain sea is the actual sea enlarged to
giant proportions. Standing here as we do now,
and gazing out into the blue waves flowing in
toward us from the distant horizon, I want to know,
gentlemen, what sort of a ship would that be, to
which these waves would rise mast-high?"

"What sort indeed?"

"Yes, you may well ask what sort! not such, I
take it, as sailed of old out of Tarsus and Tyre, calling
forth the deep wonder of Solomon; not such

as swept the seas under Nelson at Trafalgar or the
Nile; not such, even, as those that now sail under
the star-spangled banner—that heaven-symbolized
ensign—challenging the wonder of all mankind;
not even leviathan, gentlemen, now in dock at
Portsmouth—the Pennsylvania. Noah's ark, when
it rode the highest wave of the deluge—the merest
cockle-shell as it must have seemed in those mighty
waters, would be a merer cockle-shell in these."

"Fine. How figurative is his style!"

"Like Jeremy Taylor's!"

"Something of the massive grandeur of Bishop
Hooker's!"

"And the perfervidum of Milton's, with a discriminating
infusion of the swash-buckler."

"And yet, gentlemen," continued Mr. Philips,
knitting his brows, and concentrating his eyes to a
focus, as if the object of all his bile stood before
him, "and yet, though of such grandeur are these
mountains, filling the mind with such nobility of
thought, what means all this disparagement that is
sputtered forth against them by the whole herd of
modern travellers, abroad and at home, with some
few honorable exceptions, who talk such downright
arrant nonsense about them?"

"How effectually he puts a question!"

"What a fool-killer he would make!"

"The old Silenus riding an ass! Lambaste him
well, Guy, while you're on him!"

"It is the burden of all these cockneys, gentlemen,
and particularly of the John Bull, our cousin-germain,
that our mountains are poor concerns.
Why? Because (say these gentlemen fresh from the
land of Cockaigne and thereabouts) when you have
labored and toiled for half a day to get to the top
of the highest Ararat or Taurus you can find, you
can see nothing but endless mountains before you,
and always in the farthest distant some giant higher
still than that whereon, half-dead in climbing it,
you foolishly expected to behold both the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans."

"How he accumulates it upon them!"

"Piles the agony!"

"Wood up, County!"

"Throw in the bacon sides!"

"And not true this, even in fact, but miserably
untrue. Why, look around you here as you stand.
The refutation of the foolish nonsense is before your
eyes. What are all these valleys, great and small
—what all these dells and gorges, chasms, defiles,
passes—these streams and rivers, rivulets and rills.
Look at that drove of fatted beeves, winding yonder
over the Knobley—the long column seemingly interminable.
What have you to say to that lordly
city of the far mountain plain, with all its towers
and domes—its vast palaces looming up to the eye,
and looming larger as you concentrate your gaze;
visible only, it is true, to the imagination, acted

upon through the deceived sense, but yet a nobler
city than was ever built by hands!"

"Hold on, Prior, let's hear that again!"

"Dont speak, Trip; he's about to touch on something
profound."

"And if such seeming cities, gentlemen, naturally
arise to the eye here in the mountains—naturally,
because the result of natural causes, what
though in absolute fact there is no city there—
what if it is illusion—all in my eye, as the vulgar
say? It is only the reasoning mind that tells you
this. The imaginative mind tells you there is a
city: one part of your intellectual organization
says there is not, another part tells you there is, and
which do you believe? Most undoubted, as far as
the present picture is concerned, the one that tells
your sense that there before you stands the city.
And there, to all intents and purposes, it does stand
apparent before you, in all its magnified glory,
such as was never built by human hands, such as
can only be built by human brains, and those of the
nobler order; a city up to the standard of the new
Jerusalem, if your imagination is of the order of
St. John's.

"Don't go in any deeper, Prior, or the subject
will swim you."

"Devil the bit, its good wading all about where
he is."

"All this repeated cant, therefore, about our

American mountains is not true in point of fact.
But what if it were?—yes, gentlemen, what if it
were? And this question brings me to the gist
of the matter. According to the very statement of
the cockneys, upon their own showing, the view
now before them, is one that fills the human mind
with ideas of the highest sublimity; for what, to the
man of the largest comprehension, can be more impressively
vast than this same immensity of mountain
ocean that everywhere presents itself to view,
with all its heaving, interminable, giant waves!"

"There you have knocked the swords out of the
hands of the puny whipsters!"

"Killed them dead!"

"Dead as Julius Cæsar!"

"It's a slaughter of the innocents!"

"It reminds me of the setting down Ulysses gave
Thersites in the Grecian camp!

"It's great spouting!"

"A whale's!"

"Swamping the pigmies in a deluge of ocean
brine!"

"What a senator he would make! how they
would crowd the capitol when he let himself out!"

He's rather high-strung, I think, for the modern
democracy!"

"Not so, gentlemen, the very style and manner
of eloquence—translucent, bold, free, combining
imagination with reason—that has prevailed with

all who speak the English tongue, from the days
of Alfred the Great to the present time."

"Gentlemen of the expedition," resumed Mr.
Philips, wiping the beads from his forehead, and
with a self-sufficient air that would have done for
the prince of Tyre, or Xerxes when he ordered the
sea to be chained, "I think we have sufficiently
explained the cockneys."

"Explunctified 'em!"

"All to smashes, Prior!"

"At all events, gentlemen, I've said my say—
I've spit my spite, and my soul is now tranquil.
With a serene exaltation I can again gaze over
these mountain billows. The scene is indeed sublime!
I hear "the mighty waters rolling evermore"
—a sound as of the poluphloisboio thalasses is in
my ear. What a manifold ocean! Here on the
right is the classic Mediterranean:—yonder monstrous
promontory in among those jagged mountains
is Scylla; and wo unto the mariner, who,
eager to avoid its dangers, falls into the neighboring
Charybdis's awful vortex! What a going round
and round and round would be his! and what a
swallowing up as he takes the suck—down—down
—derry down, to the roaring music of the maelstrom.
Oh! gentlemen, but it would be grand
shipwreck over there. Here to the left, where the
shining valley shows itself, is the sunny Archipelago
and the Grecian isles; and that grand city

looming up from the waters is Athens—or you
may have it old Troy—or the glittering city of
Constantine, by the Thracian Bosphorus. There
to the north are those `uncouth, boisterous seas,' to
whose mercy Francis Drake `let go' all that was
left of the invincible armada. Here's the Horn,
and there's the cape `of storms'—where you see
the clouds gather. Yonder hazy point is Hatteras,
and that tall naked pine is the mast of some yankee
coaster, wrecked upon its fatal sands. All before
me is the Atlantic; and down yonder, fast-founded
by the wide-watered shore, some fifty sea-leagues
hence, methinks I behold the lordly dome of our
capitol, its gorgeous ensign peacefully flapping its
folds over the land of the free and the home of the
brave! And yet the cockneys say these a'n't mountains!"

"God bless the star-spangled banner!"

"And d—d for ever the cockney or what not,
that would disparage, in any manner, the country
over which it waves."

"At another time, gentlemen," observed the Signor
Andante, "I could desire to add something to
the glorification of our mountains, which the Prior
hasn't condescended to touch upon:—it is in regard
to the sylvan majesty of their scenery, in which
they differ entirely from the European. You have
no idea how bare the mountains abroad appear to
our eyes, accustomed to these grand forests. In

connection with this part of the subject, I would
like to take the cockneys a turn or two, upon the
splendor of the foliage in October—the hues of all
dyes—particularly the scarlet—

"But we can't stay here all day." And the
signor, without a word more, and with all that
directness and determination of manner that characterized
him, betook himself to his rheda—all the
rest following—the Prior a little whetted by the
exercise he took against the subjects of the king of
Cockaigne.