From New England Magazine
1893
Literary Associations of Berkshire County.
By James Tucker Cutler.
From Monument Mountain.
Southward, by October Mountain, through Lenox Furnace, and past Laurel Lake, the gentle Housatonic winds its tortuous way. Then, as if foreseeing from afar the formidable heights of Bear and Monument Mountains, it turns plump west through Stockbridge plain a mile and more, till with a patronizing bend towards Lake Mahkeenac and Mountain Mirror on the right, it turns its back on Stockbridge, ocean bound. Two giant sentinels — Greylock far to the north, the blue dome of Washington Mountain at the far south — guard well this valley. In summer sunlight clad in soft deep blue, but far oftener in a stern uniform of gray, — unless a winter's sun, flooding the new fall of snow, mantles them in cloth of gold,-these two sentinels, the Titans of their race, keep eternal watch over this wayward river, over the fair hills and nestling lakes of Berkshire. One may not enter this region on the north from the Green Hills of Vermont nor on the south from Connecticut's Canaan Valley, without a consciousness of the dignity and guardianship of these brother hills, "rockribbed and ancient as the sun." Eastward lie the Hoosac Mountains. To the west rises the fair Taghconic Range, so regular in its gentle undulations against the sky as to produce upon the emotions a grateful and an unfailing sense of harmony and rhythm. Dame Nature did her level best when she fashioned Berkshire. Elsewhere she has wrought effects more grand, more imposing perhaps, but nowhere scenery more exquisite in variety or more marvellous in quiet beauty. It is a region abounding in lakes and moun-
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