es their waters to carry
certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of
ground to be mined in their turn. That turbid foaming of the angry
water,--that tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of its
fury,--are no disturbances of the kind course of nature; they are
beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of man and to
the beauty of the earth. The process is continued more gently, but not
less effectively, over all the surface of the lower undulating country;
and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles through the
short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed burden of earth
to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the dingles below.

And it is not, in reality, a degrading, but a true, large, and ennobling
view of the mountain ranges of the world, if we compare them to heaps of
fertile and fresh earth, laid up by a prudent gardener beside his garden
beds, whence, at intervals, he casts on them some scattering of new and
virgin ground. That which we so often lament as convulsion or
destruction is nothing else than the momentary shaking of the dust from
the spade. The winter floods, which inflict a temporary devastation,
bear with them the elements of succeeding fertility; the fruitful field
is covered with sand and shingle in momentary judgment, but in enduring
mercy; and the great river, which chokes its mouth with marsh, and
tosses terror along its shore, is but scattering the seeds of the
harvests of futurity, and preparing the seats of unborn generations.

Sec. 10. I have not spoken of the local and peculiar utilities of
mountains: I do not count the benefit of the supply of summer streams
from the moors of the higher ranges,--of the various medicinal plants
which are nested among their rocks,--of the delicate pasturage which
they furnish for cattle,[41]--of the forests in which they bear timber
for shipping,--the stones they supply for building, or the ores of metal
which they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for working.
All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. But the three
great functions which I have just described,--those of giving motion and
change to water, air, and earth,--are indispensable to human existence;
they are operations to be regarded with as full a depth of gratitude as
the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed multiply itself in
the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening ran