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Transcriber’s Note: obvious printer’s errors have been repaired.
The late Judge William D. Kelley was an intensely practical man, and so not given to rhapsody, but he has left on record that Western North Carolina was the most beautiful country upon which his feet or eyes ever rested. He had visited many lands and gazed upon many transcendent panoramas unrolled by the Master of the Universe. He was a loyal and devoted son of Pennsylvania, and enthusiastically loved and admired her noble scenery, but when he beheld the unrivalled majesty and picturesqueness of Western North Carolina, his honest soul expanded with the prospect, and, in a burst of genuine candor, he declared that never before had he looked upon a region at once so sublime and entrancing. What Judge Kelley uttered has been, by many other enthusiasts, repeated in varying phrase and similar tenor. It is not called the Land of the Sky because of its altitude. There are numerous localities that surpass it in this particular, but rather, I think, because of a peculiar phenomenon of the region, where the azure atmosphere that we call the skies descends, or seems to do so, actually and magically upon the tree tops and mountain sides, so that the dazzled spectator almost instinctively puts forth his hand to grasp the mysterious panoply. When a child of earth is thus moved, as it were, by heaven, with the blue ether glorified by sunlight, and the alpine groups transformed in shape by fugitive clouds, no wonder his mind becomes blissfully inebriated, his soul uplifted, and his senses plumed to take wing from the solid globe that imprisons his feet. The dullest fancy cannot resist the spell.