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It is a lovely spot, Grassyvale -- "beautiful exceedingly. " But its beauty is of a quiet, unimposing description; the characteristic feature of the landscape which would strike the eye of a spectator who surveyed it from the highest neighbouring eminence, is simply -- repose. There are no mountains, properly so called, within a circuit of many miles -- none of those natural pyramids which, in various parts of our beloved land of mountain and of flood, of battle and of song, rise in majestic grandeur, like columns of adamant to support the vault of heaven. The nearest are situated at such a distance that they appear like clouds, and might readily be mistaken for such, but for their deathlike stillness, and the everlasting monotony of their outline. No waterfalls hurl their bolts of liquid crystal into dark, frowning, wave-worn chasms, which had echoed to the thunder of their fall since the birth of time. There is no far-spreading forest -- no yawning ravine, with "ebon shades and low-browed rocks" -- no beetling cliff or precipice, "shagged" with brushwood, as Milton hath it. There is nothing of the grand, the sublime, the terrible, or the magnificent -- there is only quiet; or, if the terms do not sound dissonant to "ears polite," modest, unassuming beauty, such as a rainbow, were it perpetually present in the zenith, might form a characteristic and appropriate symbol of. Nature has not here wrought her miracles of beauty on a Titanic scale.
What, then, is so attractive about Grassyvale? it will be asked. We are not sure but we may be as much stultified with this question, as was the child in Wordsworth's sweet little poem, "We are seven" (which the reader may turn up at leisure, when the propriety of the comparison will be seen), and may be forced, after an unsuccessful attempt to justify ourselves for holding such an opinion, to maintain, with the same dogmatic obstinacy -- it is beautiful. But the length of our story compels us to exclude a description of the landscape, which we had prepared.