the universal signs of
dissolution, or disorderly mingling of elements.[48]

Sec. 4. Accordingly, these slaty coherents, being usually composed of many
elements imperfectly united, are also for the most part grey, black, or
dull purple; those which are purest and hardest verging most upon
purple, and some of them in certain lights displaying, on their smooth
sides, very beautiful zones and changeful spaces of grey, russet, and
obscure blue. But even this beauty is strictly connected with their
preservation of such firmness of form as properly belongs to them; it is
seen chiefly on their even and silky surfaces; less, in comparison, upon
their broken edges, and is lost altogether when they are reduced to
powder. They then form a dull grey dust, or, with moisture, a black
slime, of great value as a vegetative earth, but of intense ugliness
when it occurs in extended spaces in mountain scenery. And thus the
slaty coherents are often employed to form those landscapes of which the
purpose appears to be to impress us with a sense of horror and pain, as
a foil to neighboring scenes of extreme beauty. There are many spots
among the inferior ridges of the Alps, such as the Col de Ferret, the
Col d'Anterne, and the associated ranges of the Buet, which, though
commanding prospects of great nobleness, are themselves very nearly
types of all that is most painful to the human mind. Vast wastes of
mountain ground, covered here and there with dull grey grass, or moss,
but breaking continually into black banks of shattered slate, all
glistening and sodden with slow tricklings of clogged, incapable
streams; the snow water oozing through them in a cold sweat, and
spreading itself in creeping stains among their dust; ever and anon a
shaking here and there, and a handful or two of their particles or
flakes trembling down, one sees not why, into more total dissolution,
leaving a few jagged teeth, like the edges of knives eaten away by
vinegar, projecting through the half-dislodged mass from the inner rock,
keen enough to cut the hand or foot that rests on them, yet crumbling as
they wound, and soon sinking again into the smooth, slippery, glutinous
heap, looking like a beach of black scales of dead fish, cast ashore
from a poisonous sea, and sloping away into foul ravines, branched down
immeasurable slopes of barrenness, where the winds howl and wander
continually, and the snow lies in wasted and sorrowful fields, covered
with sooty dust, th