'Refined grandeur'

In the Franconia Ridge Trail, in the White Mountains.

In the Franconia Ridge Trail, in the White Mountains.

Franklin_Leavitt_map_1871 (1).jpg

"A visit to New Hampshire supplies the most resources to a traveler, and confers the most benefit on the mind and taste, when it lifts him above mere appetite for wildness, ruggedness, and the feeling of mass and precipitous elevation, into a perception and love of the refined grandeur, the chaste sublimity, the airy majesty overlaid with tender and polished bloom, in which the landscape splendor of a noble mountain lies.''

-- Thomas Starr King (1824-1864), Unitarian minister