ion: FIG. 7.]

Typical character of Slaty Crystallines.

Sec. 6. I might devote half a volume to a description of the fantastic and
incomprehensible arrangement of these rocks and their veins; but all
that is necessary for the general reader to know or remember, is this
broad fact of the _undulation_ of their whole substance. For there is
something, it seems to me, inexpressibly marvellous in this phenomenon,
largely looked at. It is to be remembered that these are the rocks
which, on the average, will be oftenest observed, and with the greatest
interest, by the human race. The central granites are too far removed,
the lower rocks too common, to be carefully studied; these slaty
crystallines form the noblest hills that are easily accessible, and seem
to be thus calculated especially to attract observation, and reward it.
Well, we begin to examine them; and first, we find a notable hardness in
them, and a thorough boldness of general character, which make us regard
them as very types of perfect rocks. They have nothing of the look of
dried earth about them, nothing petty or limited in the display of their
bulk. Where they are, they seem to form the world; no mere bank of a
river here, or of a lane there, peeping out among the hedges or forests:
but from the lowest valley to the highest clouds, all is theirs--one
adamantine dominion and rigid authority of rock. We yield ourselves to
the impression of their eternal, unconquerable stubbornness of strength;
their mass seems the least yielding, least to be softened, or in anywise
dealt with by external force, of all earthly substance. And, behold, as
we look farther into it, it is all touched and troubled, like waves by a
summer breeze; rippled, far more delicately than seas or lakes are
rippled; _they_ only undulate along their surfaces--this rock trembles
through its every fibre, like the chords of an Eolian harp--like the
stillest air of spring with the echoes of a child's voice. Into the
heart of all those great mountains, through every tossing of their
boundless crests, and deep beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows
that strange quivering of their substance. Other and weaker things seem
to express their subjection to an Infinite power only by momentary
terrors: as the weeds bow down before the feverish wind, and the sound
of the going in the tops of the taller trees passes on before the
clouds, and the fitful opening of pale spaces on the dark water as if
so