Still 'a great lake' to us

(Mt.) Mansfield from Lake Champlain, by Matt Brown, at Matt Brown Fine Art, Lyme, N.H. Champlain was briefly officially listed as one of the Great Lakes.

On the Lyme Green

Smarts Mountain looms over Reservoir Pond, in Lyme.

—Photo by Ken Gallager

Folding up winter

“Dragon Journey Book” (monoprint, antique paper, encaustic, on BFK paper), by Soosen Dunholter, who lives in Peterboro, N.H., which has long hosted many artists. The MacDowell residence there for artists founded in 1907, has attracted famed creative types (painters, writers, composers, etc.) from around America since its inception. Ms. Dunholter is a member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com). Hit this link for her Web site.

View of Peterboro circa 1907, looking toward Mt. Monadnock.

‘Goodness its own heaven’

“Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven.’’

— Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) in her (1875) book Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures.

Her creation of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and its associated publishing and other ventures led to her becoming a multimillionaire. It also killed some people who failed to get proper medical attention, opting instead for prayer, which Christian Science has traditionally favored over all other treatments. For that matter, Mrs. Baker argued that illness is an illusion. (This led to many sick jokes about ailing Christian Scientists.)

Mrs. Baker’s creation attracted many affluent New Englanders as adherents. But its heyday is long past. But another denomination with New England roots, Mormonism, still thrives. Its founder, Joseph Smith, was born in Sharon, Vt.

The farm in Bow, N.H., where Mary Baker Eddy was born.

Mary Baker Eddy’s gravesite in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Mass.

The Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial, in Sharon, Vt., where the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) was born in 1805. He was killed by angry mob in Nauvoo, Ill., in 1844. That’s where he is buried.

'Minor Matterhorn' overlooking 'agricultural failure'

Mt. Chocorua.

"Written over the great New Hampshire region at least, and stamped, in particular, in the shadow of the admirable high-perched cone of Chocorua, which rears itself, all granite, over a huge interposing shoulder, quite with the allure of a minor Matterhorn -- everywhere legible was the hard little historic record of agricultural failure and defeat. It had to  pass for the historic background, that traceable truth that a stout human experiment had been tried, had broken down. One was in presence, everywhere, of the refusal to consent to history, and of the consciousness, on the part of every site, that this precious compound is in no small degree being insolently made, on the other side of the continent, at the expense of such sites. The touching appeal of nature, as I have called it therefore, the 'Do something kind for me,' is not so much a 'Live upon me and thrive by me' as a 'Live with me, somehow, and let us make out together what we may do for each other -- something that is not merely estimable in more or less greasy greenbacks.'''

-- Henry James from his book The AmerIcan Scene (1907)