Mt. Moosilauke (1913) - Barn Door Landscapes
". . . We all, I suppose, have some precious little pictures stored away in our memories with the magic of childhood or the open world about them, pictures that flash upon our inward eye, like Wordsworth's daffodils, and bring pleasure and the dancing heart. It was Wordsworth's genius to feel so profoundly that his pictures persisted in memory till he could transcribe them into a poem. Called the poet of tranquillity, his tranquillity was like Teufelsdrockh's, that of the spinning top. More than all others, he is the poet of tremendous emotion. And it was in an effort to realize with true intensity of feeling my own stored impressions of natural scenes that I came to recognize how large and how beautiful a place is filled in my memory by barn-door landscapes.
They have been coming back to me one by one since I saw Moosilauke between golden, dusty walls of hay the other morning, coming back with an aura of enchantment upon them, coming back from forgotten childhood, from careless tramps down world in autumn, from all my country yesterdays. A little gallery of barn-door landscapes, of peeps into the ideal - for every barn-door landscape is a perfect composition! - they are very precious to me now that I have sorted and arranged them, hung them, as it were. I wonder if others could not do equally well in the galleries of their memory?"
From "Barn Doors" by Walter Prichard Eaton, pp. 240-243, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.1). ©1999.
