As we came back, the light yet lingered on the top of Slide Mountain.

          “‘The last that parleys with the setting sun,’”

said I, quoting Wordsworth.

“That line is almost Shakespearean,” said my companion.  “It suggests that great hand at least, though it has not the grit and virility of the more primitive bard.  What triumph and fresh morning power in Shakespeare’s lines that will occur to us at sunrise to-morrow!—­

                                   “’And jocund day
          Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.’

“Or in this:—­

          “’Full many a glorious morning have I seen
          Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.’

“There is savage, perennial beauty there, the quality that Wordsworth and nearly all the modern poets lack.”

“But Wordsworth is the poet of the mountains,” said I, “and of lonely peaks.  True, he does not express the power and aboriginal grace there is in them, nor toy with them and pluck them up by the hair of their heads, as Shakespeare does.  There is something in Peakamoose yonder, as we see it from this point, cutting the blue vault with its dark, serrated edge, not in the bard of Grasmere; but he expresses the feeling of loneliness and insignificance that the cultivated man has in the presence of mountains, and the burden of solemn emotion they give rise to.  Then there is something much more wild and merciless, much more remote from human interests and ends, in our long, high, wooded ranges than is expressed by the peaks and scarred groups of the lake country of Britain.  These mountains we behold and cross are not picturesque,—­they are wild and inhuman as the sea.  In them you are in a maze, in a weltering world of woods; you can see neither the earth nor the sky, but a confusion of the growth and decay of centuries, and must traverse them by your compass or your science of woodcraft,—­a rift through the trees giving one a glimpse of the opposite range or of the valley beneath, and he is more at sea than ever; one does not know his own farm or settlement when framed in these mountain treetops; all look alike unfamiliar.”

Not the least of the charm of camping out is your camp-fire at night.  What an artist!  What pictures are boldly thrown or faintly outlined upon the canvas of the night!  Every object, every attitude of your companion is striking and memorable.  You see effects and groups every moment that you would give money to be able to carry away with you in enduring form.  How the shadows leap, and skulk, and hover about!  Light and darkness are in perpetual tilt and warfare, with first the one unhorsed, then the other.  The friendly and cheering fire, what acquaintance we make with it!  We had almost forgotten there was such an element, we had so long known only its dark offspring, heat.  Now we see the wild beauty uncaged and note its manner and temper.  How surely it creates its own draught and sets the currents going, as force and enthusiasm always will!  It carves itself a chimney out of the fluid and houseless air.  A friend, a ministering angel, in subjection; a fiend, a fury, a monster, ready to devour the world, if ungoverned.  By day it burrows in the ashes and sleeps; at night it comes forth and sits upon its throne of rude logs, and rules the camp, a sovereign queen.