Wachusett from Fair Haven Hill looks like this:
the dotted line being the top of the surrounding forest. There is a whitish line along the base of Wachusett more particularly, as if the reflection of bare cliffs there in the sun. Undoubtedly it is the slight vaporous haze in the atmosphere seen edgewise just above the top of the forest, though it is a clear day. It, this line, makes the mountains loom, in fact, a faint whitish line; separating the mountains from their bases and the rest of the globe.
In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth, and be reminded of the invisible towns and communities, for the most part also unremembered, which lie in the further and deeper hollows between me and those hills. Towns of sturdy uplandish fame, where some of the morning and primal vigor still lingers, I trust. Ashburnham, Rindge, Jaffrey, etc., - it is cheering to think that it is with such communities that we survive or perish, and be reminded how many brave and contented lives are lived between me and the horizon.
Yes, the mountains do thus impart, in the mere prospect of them, some of the New Hampshire vigor. These hills extend our plot of earth; they make our native valley or indentation in the earth so much the larger.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 2, 1852
In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth. See June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon."); June 25, 1852 The mountain outline is remarkably distinct, and the intermediate earth appears . . .like a vast saucer sloping up ward to its sharp mountain rim."); July 27, 1852 ("The whole surface of the earth a succession of these great cups, falling away from dry or rocky edges to gelid green meadows and water in the midst, where night already is setting in!"); August 5, 1852 (" For the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim."); September 27, 1852 ("From our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them." March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); November 1, 1858 ("A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are."); October 22, 1857("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? ");March 28, 1858 ("From this hilltop I overlook,. . . this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it."); March 28, 1858 (" On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see..")
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