“Mount Washington,’’ by Samuel Lancaster Gerry (1813-1891)
“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), an American Universalist/Unitarian minister.
He was influential in California politics during the Civil War, and pressed to keep California rather than splitting off as a separate country.
He vacationed in New Hampshire’s White Mountains in the 1850’s while a minister in Boston and in 1859 published a book entitled The White Hills {Mountains}; their Legends, Landscapes, & Poetry.
